Jean Hegland ‘Into the Forest’

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—There came a time when I yearned for the life contained in those swaying yellow school busses… it was not long after Eva discovered Ballet when I was so smarting from the hole her dancing had caused in my life and I think I tried to persuade my parents to let me go to school as a way of easing my loneliness. ‘We didn’t keep you out of school for all these years just to let you start now’ she said ‘junior high school is one of the most toxic experiences I can imagine’

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Eva’s and her sister’s parents have escaped from society, living 30 to 40 miles from the nearest town in the forest, home schooling their two daughters who, having no friends of their own age are very close when they are young with this relationship becoming strained as they develop their different characters, the opening quote showing this separation and the background for the escape in the mother’s

But then all goes wrong in the outside world, maybe due to wars, maybe due to shortages and then to disease, the book doesn’t investigate the why’s. Quickly there is no outside world, and they can only survive if they become self-sufficient. They measure the time from the disruption by their mother’s illness and death, she died in hospital, soon after there were no hospitals.

The girls then live in a false sense of the world and fantasy continuity as their father tries to take care of everything, planting, harvesting and preserving in the clearing around their house to be ready for the winter as the girls continue to prepare for their planned futures back in civilisation in Harvard and Ballet school. And then their father dies, cutting his femoral artery whilst cutting wood The slow realisation that they need to act together to survive comes to them with the final realisation after readingthe tragic  story of a lone woman in the wilderness in the encyclopaedia:

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—There will be no rescue! Ever since this began we’ve been waiting to be saved , waiting like stupid princesses for our rightful lives to be restored to us for we’ve only been fooling ourselves only playing out another fairy tale, our story can no more have a happy ending than the lone woman’s did, the lights will never again come on out here, the phone will never ring for us Eva and I will live like this until we die, hoarding and cringing and finally starving.

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In this book nature is hostile, a thing to be afraid of, their moth.er had brought them up to be afraid of their surroundings, of the wild animals and for the unknown and maybe poisonous plants. Luckily thanks to books they learn not to tame nature but to live in harmony with it, even killing a wild boar for food when needed, this whole section lacks in reality, especially when read in parallel with Règne Animal, the subject of my next post.

The girls eventually free themselves from their house to live in a tree stump as they pass in the forest from escape to adventure.

The believability of the story aside, on the character side  this is an interesting Bildungsroman for Eva and her sister, the narrator.

First published in English as ‘Into The Forest ‘ by Calyx books in 1996
Translated into French by Josette Chicheportiche as “Dans La Forêt” and published by Gallmeister in 2017