I’m trying to watch the new season of Silo on my iPad but it is so dark that it’s hard to follow. Someone posted a screen shot of it on Bluesky and it was just a block of black. The protagonist has got out of her silo and into another but because she is underground with only a wind up torch the scenes are badly lit. I mean we have to be able to see the actors.
I’m looking forward to the new season of the excellent series Severance also on Apple TV.
I’m reading another Samantha Harvey book. It’s called The Wilderness. When you pick up a Harvey book or open it on your device, you know you are in the hands of a gifted writer.
The Wilderness is about a man in his 60s with encroaching Alzheimers. As he sifts through his memories we can glean his life story. He’s a retired architect. We hear about his buildings, his wife, Helen, his son Henry, his daughter Alice, mother Sara, her lover Rook and Jake’s lovelorn childhood friend Ellie who looks after him at the end.
Jakes’ life story is interesting – his mother was an Austrian Jew who escaped to England. His beautifully drawn wife has died and his son is in prison. After the war he left London with his young family to return to where he was brought up in the peat moors of Lincolnshire.
But we don’t get the whole story because it comes to us in repeated snatches as Jake struggles with his memory.
His memory is bogged down like the moors but repeated motifs link his memories together and frequent visits to a doctor show us the progress of the disease. One symbol running through the book is the block of trees called the “woods” where he and Sara used to walk and many of which were marked for logging just like parts of his brain. The cover of the version I read had a picture of a tree whose branches were the neurons in our brains.
The satisfying part of this challenging book was how we as readers find out what happened to Helen and Alice through the words of other characters but not until the end. It’s narrated in the third person stream of consciouness method so we only get the “truth” through the dialogue of other characters. I like to think that Jake found peace at the end.