There was once a nature poem trilling, trapped, within a novel convinced it needed traumatized woman more than the self-determined wild.
“When we were were eight, Dad cut me open from throat to stomach.”
These first words carve Once There Were Wolves open to suggest horrible wonder. The speaker, Inti Flynn, has a neurological condition called mirror synesthesia which forces her body to feel every sensation she sees in others. This otherworldly empathy enables the first line, when she and her twin Aggie slip into their father’s shed and see him skin a rabbit, taking his knife first from throat to stomach.
From that first line, author Charlotte McConaghy writes the novel’s arresting first section, adding the first passage of the Scottish highlands, where the adult Inti has come to introduce fourteen Canadian grey wolves. Ancient wolves once roamed the Scottish hills and their lower forests but were hunted to extinction by farmers and monarchs. Inti, a wolf biologist tasked with culling the predator-free deer population to encourage greater plant growth, sets the wolves loose into the landscape knowing full well that local sheep farmers will shoot them at the slightest provocation. Her team’s mission is tense. The highlands around her are cold, misty, and wild.
Somewhere inside Once There Were Wolves, there breathes a rooted ecological novel. It smells earthiest and sweetest in these opening sections, where McConaghy writes with welcoming room for the wild, the way a hiker must step around roots or stones, listen for the whispers of water, and lower her head under boughs. Her eye and prose exist for the wolves, the sky, and the tapestries of land where man is rare. When the novel exhales those first deep highland winds, the reader is thrilled in the cold. Inti’s respect for wolves, her initial closeness to their dignity, is the loveliest scent of the novel.
And yet, and yet. McConaghy allows the scent to dissipate after its early promise. After the first few passages, this near-mythopoetic heart must retreat from the open and linger out of sight among the silver birch trees.
Because, as with many a “literary fiction” novel, Once There Were Wolves is constrained in plot-based melodrama: McConaghy adds like yokes a wifebeater, a rugged lover with a haunted past, the wifebeater’s murder, a surprise pregnancy, a search for the killer, potential wolf attacks, an improbable birth in the moonlit snow, wolves killed by farmers, and (somehow) a happy ending on a Scottish hillside. All the while, the ecological novel grows thinner.
While Inti topically attends to her wolves, she (and the novel) fixates most on her lover, Duncan, as her twin Aggie (now mute) lives distantly in Inti’s rented cottage. Duncan is investigating but also implicated in the murder of the wifebeater, which might’ve also been a wolf attack like the other attacks that set hackles rising between Inti and local farmers. Too much happens for the sake of its blaring urgency, too much for so little rhythm.
As with many characters of a crime novel, how Duncan and Inti track the mystery requires many, many lines of unfortunate dialogue. Every character states everything in airless exposition, as though they’re scripted automata. No clue, no threat, and no fear can happen in wordless suspense, as it most certainly should. Implication? Eliminated without even a flourish.
Human Trauma for Human Determination of Wildness
After the initial promise of how the novel observes wolves reintroduced into the highlands, Once There Were Wolves lapses into a familiar mold beneath the crime-genre—the “trauma plot.” This narrative form unfolds the backstory of a (female) protagonist in parallel to her present-day plot, so that the two stories advance and climax at the same pace. It foregrounds the harms she has suffered, who once harmed her and how, because the present-day features that place the character in tension with her surroundings—in Inti’s case, her sharp unfriendliness, reflexive reserve, and her workaholic tendencies—must be explained as scars, never merely experienced as characterization.
This trauma-first form has been reared across contemporary novels (A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn, Hell of a Book by Jason Mott) and smuggled into their small-screen adaptations. McConaghy, for all the bite of her few sections of clipped blunt prose, falls into lockstep with the form. Inti becomes a rote “damaged” woman of anger like so many of her sisters. And Aggie, it inevitably turns out, was once married to a handsome surgeon named Gus who (like his many rote brothers across trauma plots) becomes an abusive brute. Inti’s memories of Gus and Aggie screen in short asides within the main narrative. These interludes are exhaustive in recounting how Gus abused the two sisters, and excruciating for being so. For the reader’s catharsis through Inti, her recounting and revelation must total, her adversity must be total.
But it is human catharsis only, from a novel which claims interest in the wild mind.
That’s the novel’s chief disease. Though McConaghy links Inti’s healing with the returning alder sprouts of ecological healing in a clumsy epilogue, the former always determines the latter in Once There Were Wolves. The wild is determined only by the human, which is false to life but also to the ideals the novel espouses through Inti and through her tragic, outdoorsman father who lived and died for old-growth forests in the western Canada.
Take the series of wolf attacks, which Inti attributes to the most fearless of the female wolves. She fears the animal killed the murder victim in savage opportunism, even believing that the wolf might’ve attacked Duncan when he is found mutilated and near death outside his home. The chance of the farmers’ revenge against the other wolves is so great that Inti (improbably, now that she’s nine months pregnant with Duncan’s daughter) hunts down and kills the wolf in the highlands.
But the wolf, Inti later realizes, never attacked anyone. It was Aggie. Aggie becomes the creature in the dark slashing the throats of men she perceived as threats to herself and Inti—traumatized Aggie, who once lived buoyantly before her abusive marriage but now regresses into protective violence. Inti’s sister, the emblem of damaged yet noble womanhood, supplants the raw, natural danger of the wolf. In this faux-ecological novel, this revelation makes sense. McConaghy places the locus of meaning only (always) in human terms rather than ecological ones, though she clearly knows the ecology she includes.
What if, instead, this wolf had attacked both men? Inti would’ve had to reckon truly with the amoral essence of the predator. Wifebeater, lover; despicable, good; deserving, undeserving; sinful, sinless; all our morals are naught before the teeth of hunger and opportunity. That’s what can make wild places and conserving them unnerving. I watch for the barred owls, even dream of spotting a great horned owl flying from the pines, even as I know these silent birds would snatch, kill, and dismember every single one of my mother’s cats. That is one essence of the natural world, and only sometimes do we catch a glimpse of it.
McConaghy looks away, in Once There Were Wolves.
That’s a shame I don’t enjoy criticizing, because her ecological fiction so nearly has the strength and the range and the potential. The novel’s prose and sensibility could’ve had the freshness of lyricism, complexity, and gravity of landscapes evoked with only a blade’s touch. But Once There Were Wolves is not free of the trauma-first, human-only fiction like an ill-fitted GPS collar around its neck.
Thanks for being here, y’all. I don’t plan to prize hatchet-job book reviews over going forward, if you’re worried about curmudgeonly negativity—it’s just that reading books often involves disliking some of them (and expressing that fairly).
As a reminder: this is the last book review I’ll send to all subscribers, since after Friday only paying subscribers will have full access to every piece of my work. Each month the third-Thursday essays will remain free, as will one of the Saturday poetry readings.
I’ll be in touch again on April 7. Thanks so much for the support y’all have already shown me.
Without having read the novel, I guess I could imagine that Aggie's going wild could be an attempt by the author to integrate the human world into the ecological world. I'm leaning toward this interpretation because of your statement that "Aggie, who once lived buoyantly before her abusive marriage but now regresses into protective violence. Inti’s sister, the emblem of damaged yet noble womanhood, supplants the raw, natural danger of the wolf."
Maybe the "locus of meaning" isn't so much stated in human terms as human terms are folded into the ecological bent of the novel. Just a thought—again, I haven't read the book.