Ian McDonald’s “The Wilding”
A gorgeous, goddamned terrifying novel from one of the absolute greats.
I’ll be in Tucson, AZ from November 8–10: I’m the Guest of Honor at the TusCon science fiction convention.
Ian McDonald is one of those absurdly brilliant novelists that just leave me wondering the actual fuck he manages it. How does he cover so much ground, think up so many compelling characters, find so many gracenotes, conjure up so many complicated emotions?
McDonald burst on the scene in the late 1980s, with the 1988 novel Desolation Road and then his 1989 Out On Blue Six, a slick, stylized cyberpunk-meets-Orwell tale that overflowed with beautiful prose, technomysticism, and sly jokes that hid sneaky truths that hid even more sly jokes:
https://memex.craphound.com/2014/01/20/out-on-blue-six-ian-mcdonalds-brilliant-novel-is-back/
By my count, McDonald has now published twenty books — mostly novels, but a couple short story collections (and the most amazingly demented, Tom-Waits-inflected teddybear murder comic imaginable, 1994’s Kling Klang Klatch):
https://irishcomics.fandom.com/wiki/Kling_Klang_Klatch
McDonald’s work is truly globespanning. While he’s made his mark on the Martian soil, and overtaken the moon with the Luna trilogy (his definitive rebuttal to Heinlein’s Moon Is a Harsh Mistress) he is widely adored and much-awarded for the glittering, futuristic versions of Brazil (Brasyl), Tanzania (the Chaga series), and India (River of Gods).
Indeed, McDonald’s imagination has roamed so far over the Earth and the solar system that it’s possible to overlook his fantastic reimaginings of Ireland, the land where he was raised. There’s his Philip K Dick Award-winning 1991 novel King of Morning, Queen of Day, a swirling, mythopoeic novel of Celtic mysticism:
https://www.baen.com/king-of-morning-queen-of-day.html
And then there’s 1992’s Hearts, Hands and Voices, which is lowkey one of the best novels I have ever, ever read — a scorching science fictional allegory for The Troubles, but with the gnarliest biotech weirdness you can possibly imagine:
https://archive.org/details/heartshandsvoice0000ianm/mode/2up
McDonald’s books cover so much goddamned ground, but one feature they all share is a prose styling wherein every sentence is at least 20% poetry, a fraction that somehow, impossibly, rises to as much as 150% in certain especially shiny passages.
Like this passage, which opens The Wilding, McDonald’s new horror novel that marks his first return to Ireland since 1992:
Autumn lay on the great bog in silvers and tans, late purples and duns.
The sun rose above the tall ash saplings and feral sycamore. It called the birds into full voice. Stabbing shrills, tumbles of notes, the flutes of dove-call, frantic ticking hisses, song upon song. In hedgerows and copses, among the pale foliage of the birches, in the weave of deep willow and the bramble fastnesses, each bird called and was heard. In this season the peatland held the day’s warmth through the night and on the bright, clear mornings rivers of mist formed, filling the subtle hollow places in the exposed cuttings, the bogs and fields. High sun would dispel it but at this hour half of Lough Carrow lay mist-bound. Each blade of grass hung heavy with dew, the clumps of sedges were already browning, the bracken curling and crisping.
A pair of horns lifted above the willow scrub and out-grown ash hedges of the Wilding. Polished tips caught the low sun and kindled as bright and keen as spears.
https://www.gollancz.co.uk/titles/ian-mcdonald/the-wilding/9781399611503/
Oof.
I would drop everything to read Ian McDonald’s grocery lists but after that opening, I wasn’t going to put this one down, and I didn’t, reading the whole thing on yesterday’s flight home from my gigs in Atlanta this week.
The Wilding is (I’m pretty sure?) McDonald’s first horror novel, and it’s fucking terrifying. It’s set in a rural Irish peat bog that has been acquired by a conservation authority that is rewilding it after a century of industrial peat mining that stripped it back nearly to the bedrock. This rewilding process has been greatly accelerated by the covid lockdowns, which reduced the human footprint in the conservation area to nearly zero.
The story’s protagonist is Lisa, a hard-case Dubliner who came to the bog to do community service after a career as a crime syndicate driver for hire, a woman who never met a car she couldn’t boost and pilot in or out of any tight situation. After years in the bog, she’s ready to start a new life, studying Yeats at university, indulging a late-discovered love of poetry that has as much to do with her redemption as her years in the wild.
Lisa’s last duty before she leaves the bog and goes home to Dublin is leading a school group on a wild campout in one of the bog’s deep clearings. It’s a routine assignment, and while it’s not her favorite duty, it’s also not a serious hardship.
But as the group hikes out to the campsite, one of her fellow guides is killed, without warning, by a mysterious beast that moves so quickly they can barely make out its monstrous form. Thus begins a tense, mysterious, spooky as hell story of survival in a haunted woods, written in the kind of poesy that has defined McDonald’s career, and which — when deployed in service of terror — has the power to raise literal goosebumps.
There’s a lot of fantasy that deals with Celtic mythology, including McDonald’s own King of Morning, Queen of Day, but the vibe of that stuff tends to the heroic and romantic — sure, there’s the odd banshee, but in the main, it’s mischievous wee people, pookas, and leprechauns. More fey than fear.
But Irish mythology in its raw form is terrifying. The monsters of Irish storytelling are grotesque, mean, remorseless, and come in every shape and size. Some authors have done well by going back to the bestiary for the deep cuts. When I was a kid, I must have read John Coyne’s Hobgoblin fifty times (mostly because it was about D&D, which I was obsessed with). I haven’t read this one since I was about 12, and I have no idea if it’d hold up today, but it left me with a deep appreciation of the spooky multifariousness of monsters who dwell in Ireland’s bogs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobgoblin_(novel)
The Wilding is a suspense novel, which means there’s no way to really sum up the plot without spoiling a lot of the affect, but suffice to say that McDonald brings large swathes of deep Irish lore to the surface, and it had me reading as fast as I could and wanting to put the book down and hide.
What a writer McDonald is! The fact that this is the same guy who wrote last year’s stunning secret-history/solarpunk/uncategorizable wonder that was Hopeland beggars belief:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/30/electromancy/#the-grace
Read you some Ian McDonald novels, is what I’m trying to say. This one is only available in the UK, if that’s not where you are, consider mail-ordering it. Looks like they’ve got stock at Forbidden Planet for £19 plus £18 shipping to the US. Worth every penny:
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/25/bogman/#erin-go-aaaaaaargh
