Review of The Puma by Danielle Wells – A profound story of cyclical violence | books

WWhen the protagonist of Daniel Wiles’s debut novel, Mercia’s Take, set in a mining community during the Industrial Revolution, leaves a bag of gold in the basement unprotected and then goes to bed, I actually close the book, trying to stop the unfolding disaster. After finding this stitch of gold, miner Michael dreams that his son can go to school, instead of joining the other children who work in the mine, like “blind, hairless rodents digging themselves for scraps of candlelight.” In the novel, which won the 2023 Betty Trask Prize, everything comes close to Michael: lungs clogged, tunnels collapsing, narrow horse-drawn boats attacked by robbers in the sooty dusk. It is a vivid reminder of the cost, in physical suffering, of resource extraction.

Puma, Wells’ second novel, is also a serious, intense historical novel about a father with limited resources trying to break the cycle of violence. In the early 1950s, Bernardo, a more morally ambiguous character than Michael, brings his young son James across the Atlantic from England to the house in the forests of Patagonia where he himself grew up. James happily talks about becoming a footballer, but is distracted by Bernardo. He believes he sees “the shadows of his family coming in and out,” reminding him of a childhood in which “his eyes were wide and aching with pity and he was barefoot and empty-hearted.”

Hence, the plot presents a challenge to the reviewer. It is difficult to summarize the subtle movement between present and past, between Patagonia and Liverpool and France, which gradually reveals the violence from which Bernardo fled and the violence into which he entered – as a civilian in the attack and a British Army medic in Normandy. In the present story, a sudden tragedy splits the thin book, replacing Bernardo’s search for the idea of ​​home with a search for revenge.

In the first part, the temporary domestic life between father and son is told with enough tension to make the reader restless with anticipation. The second part, in which Bernardo hunts an elusive puma, I found less interesting. There are pages of twigs and brambles, of rocks and mountain ridges, of smells and scratches on tree bark, of blood and pus and chills, of kindling. Bernardo measures his life in dwindling bullets. “The Puma became his only possession in this world and his only goal. It supported him in body and mind.” Obsession takes on a life of its own.

The non-human world is clearly a victim of Bernardo’s inability to deal with his difficult human feelings. The displacement of harm into the landscape can feel like a powerful critique of twentieth-century masculinity, as when the novel draws imaginative parallels between a man shot in the eye on a French battlefield and an innocent puma cub seen through rifle sight. For a brief period, Bernardo is accompanied on his mission by a Mapuche man. The Mapuche resisted Spanish colonization in Chile, and this passage illustrates the contrast between capitalist destruction and more sustainable indigenous livelihoods. To illustrate this point, Bernardo encounters other hunters and is angered by their gaze: “These cruel bastards. They don’t kill Huemul.” [deer] To survive, it is just money for them.

But at times the book itself verges on an escapist fantasy of retreating from the complexities of society into the primal “wilderness.” Bernardo is described as transforming into “a new person, everything that came before has been stripped away. His eyes are like red balls of desire.” At this point, I was reminded, uncomfortably, of the hormonal imagery of an ad for a men’s perfume.

The Puma’s voice is more uneven and floaty than the catchy Black Country accent of Mercia’s Take. The prose here is elegantly elliptical: “The vast expanse of metamorphic rock, old and misshapen and covered with a thin white layer like flashes of bone between skin.” This combination of scientific accuracy and elegant metaphor is the tone of literary fiction rather than an individual character in a particular time and place. The Puma is less premium than Mercia’s Take. But it expands Wiles’ sincere ambition to explore marginalized histories with profound impact on storytelling.