Review: The Wild Silence
Gaby Meares
The Wild Silence is the follow up book to The Salt Path which was one of my favourite books of 2019.
After completing their 630 mile walk along the wild English coastline, Raynor and Moth are now reasonably settled in rented accomodation, but Moth’s debilitating illness, (Corticobasal degeneration (CBD)) has returned with a vengeance and Raynor is struggling to accept his failing health. Her description of the destructive nature of Moths’s illness is harrowing:
CBC was changing him. Not with the instant destruction of an illness that spread like wildfire, but with a slow loss of form and connectivity…Less wildfire, more a slow, insidious climate change of lost functions. His was becoming a flatter, emptier place. His body a world of hedges without birdlife, of rivers without fish and orchards without insects, as his tongue forgot how to taste and the feelings slipped from his hands.
The Wild Silence fills in the back story of their relationship; how they first met, and how hard Raynor fell for Moth from the start.
In the wild grip of nature we had formed a bond that didn’t need words, a bond as palpably real and completely untouchable as the song of the deer in the quiet stillness before the storm.
Throughout the book she returns to her love of, and dependance on, Moth: ‘I always followed. There was no question; if he went I would be behind him.’ I was left with an uncomfortable feeling that she was too dependant on Moth, and wonder how she will ever cope without him.
The high points in this book are Winn’s descriptions of the British landscape, and her and Moth’s obvious love of the countryside and all its natural inhabitants. When they take on a rundown farm in the Cornish hills, and begin to rewild the land, the book sings. She laments our disconnect with nature:
At what point in our lives does cynicism take over from instinct? When we stop feeling the softness of rain on our face and start worrying about being wet?…When do we make that switch from being part of the natural world to being an observer with an assumed right to control it?
I must say I found the chapters recounting their trek in Iceland with friends an unwanted diversion, and as hard going as the actual trek appeared to have been! However, The Wild Silence has many sublime moments that far outweigh the slower moments. I feel like I know Raynor and Moth, and I am invested in their future lives.
Raynor Winn and Rachel Joyce (Miss Benson’s Beetle) were guests at 2020 The Stroud Book Festival, and this conversation enriched my appreciation of The Wild Silence:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k64_2zNcFcw&feature=youtu.be