Didn't finish this book. I didn't enjoy all the hunting, skinning and killing. Definitely not for me.

Abi Andrews has written a remarkably ambitious and thought provoking meditation on what it is to be a woman with strong connections to the earth, the environment and the wilderness. She develops a philosophy through the young 19 year old Erin, a brave and courageous woman, who embarks on a thrilling and enthralling adventure through the Arctic wilderness and across the US. It begins with a reflection on why it is men who are explorers and adventurers, such as Bear Grylls. She watches a Chris McCandless documentary which provides the impetus for the far reaching decision to travel across the Arctic through a difficult road trip and eventually choosing to live in an isolated cabin in Alaska completely alone. She undertakes the mission of making her own video documentary and biography, filming interviews with people and the events that she encounters, including her personal impressions and emotional feelings on the whole process. This is an extraordinary challenge to the tenet that this is a man's world.

I loved Erin's exploration of a wide and diverse range of subject matter, crucial to the development of a universal feminist philosophy on the protection of the wondrous wilderness, connecting the threads of her thinking on being a woman with that of the need for environmental protection. She draws on Inuit approaches on life and death in her conclusions. This is a terrific story of adventure, original in its construction of a philosophical approach to the study of feminism, with a Erin who is implacable in her determination to protect the wilderness she is bewitched by and loves. A wonderfully brilliant read that makes a change from my usual reading fare. Highly recommended! Many thanks to Serpent's Tail for an ARC.

This is an adventure novel unlike any adventure novel you have read before (I think so, anyway: clearly, I haven’t read all of them, so I can’t be sure). There are two reasons for this. Firstly, the author, Abi Andrews, takes her female protagonist, Erin, into what has historically been a man’s world: exploring the wilderness. Secondly, the book’s mixture of fact and fiction is so well constructed that without the phrase "A Novel" in the title you could be forgiven for thinking you are reading a travel diary, albeit a very literary one. What we get when these two combine is a "feminist documentary on wilderness".

That first characteristic, a woman in a man’s world, is key. Without doubt this (at least, the first 80% of it) is a feminist book setting out to show the injustice and oppression of the patriarchy that has dominated society.

After watching a film about Chris McCandless, Erin makes a decision to take a road trip across Canada in order to stay on her own in a remote cabin in Alaska.

"I cried and promised myself I would start a savings account to fund a trip to Alaska, where I too could live in the wilderness in total solitude. Then I went through the film step by step and analysed how it would have been different if the guy had been a girl."

Because

"Even on those documentary channels that do programmes on whole families homesteading in the wilderness the woman is always Mountain Man’s wife, never, ever Mountain Woman, just an annexe of the Mountain Man along with his beard, pipe and gun."

She decides that she will use a video camera to capture events and interviews with people she meets and to create a documentary for which she has great plans on her return. The way the documentary and her feelings about it develop are fascinating elements of the story: the documentary serves as a way of filtering experiences to decide what or how things matter.

For a while, I was a bit worried that the premise of the book seemed to be “man has subjugated woman and man has subjugated nature, therefore women and nature should have an affinity”. I wasn’t sure about quotes like:

"Cetaceans are women’s allies in the war against patriarchy because patriarchy holds the cetaceans down with us. Orcas travel in matriarchal pods. The root of the word dolphin, delphus, means womb."

But, as the story and the philosophy develop, they become more and more compelling and coherent. I am not saying I am in 100% agreement and am converted to Erin’s views of women’s place in the world and the right way to live, but her thoughts are well put together and make for an engrossing, thought-provoking read.

The book is the story of her journey and the time she spends alone in Alaska. The journey to Alaska includes a number of incidents that confirm Erin’s view that it is a man’s world (mainly unwanted sexual attention).

Mixed in with the events, Erin takes time to record her thoughts about a wide variety of topics, all of which she connects together. So, we get a travel documentary filled with feminism, biography and then also thoughts about things such as the Voyager space missions, the lunar landings, time capsules, the Golden Records, Rachel Carson, the Unabomber, Jack Kerouac and many others. Gradually, all of these different topics converge and connect and the final 20% of the book becomes Erin’s philosophy for life which is largely based on the Inuit philosophy of metempsychosis:

"Metempsychosis. That is what the Ancient Greeks called the transmigration of souls, similar to what the Inuit believe in. E=mc2 is the famous equation by Einstein and what it means is that the amount of energy in a particle is equal to its mass times the speed of light squared, and what this means is that the Inuits are right again. It means that energy and mass or matter are interchangeable."

This combination of story and contemplation gives the book the feel of a documentary rather than a work of fiction (and clearly not everything in it is fiction). Andrews' writing is vivid and observant: I was left feeling that someone somewhere must have lived all of this given the detail as it’s hard to imagine someone thinking of all that without experiencing it.

"We walked inland through the mountains against the meltwater of the glacier as it found its way to the sea. It was urgent, dense and grey; panicked like a jar of paintbrush water knocked onto a meticulous landscape."

Alone in Alaska, Erin’s thoughts get more and more extravagant and include dream sequences. It is this that helps her pull it all together and leads us to the final sections of the book which focus more on philosophy and how to live life.

You don’t have to agree with everything Andrews gives Erin to say and think, but, even if you don’t, there is plenty of food for thought in what Erin discusses. The story is fairly straightforward, but is well written. The combination of story and contemplation makes this an absorbing book.

To be published by Serpent’s Tail, I received a free review copy from the publisher in exchange for my honest unedited feedback.