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When the protagonist of Daniel Wiles’s debut novel Mercia’s Take, set in a mining community during the industrial revolution, left a bag of gold downstairs unprotected and then went to bed, I actually closed the book, in an attempt to stop the unfolding disaster. After finding this seam of gold, miner Michael dreams that his son will be able to go to school, rather than join the other children who work in the mine, like “blind, bald rodents unearthing themselves in search of scraps of candlelight”. In the novel, which won the 2023 Betty Trask prize, everything closes in on Michael: lungs clog, tunnels collapse, horse-drawn narrowboats are attacked by robbers in the sooty dusk. It’s a vivid reminder of the cost, in bodily suffering, of resource extraction.
The Puma, Wiles’s second novel, is also a serious and intense historical novel about a father with limited resources who attempts to break a cycle of violence. In the early 1950s Bernardo, a more morally ambiguous figure than Michael, has brought his young son James across the Atlantic from England to the house in the Patagonian woods where he himself grew up. James chatters blithely about becoming a footballer, but Bernardo is distracted. He thinks he sees “shadows of his family walking in and out”, reminding him of a childhood in which “his eyes were wide and hurt by the twilight and he was barefooted and emptyhearted”.
From here, the plot presents a challenge to a reviewer. It’s difficult to summarise the subtle movement between present and past, between Patagonia, Liverpool and France, that gradually reveals the violence Bernardo fled and the violence – as a civilian in the blitz and a British army medic in Normandy – that he walked into. In the present storyline, a sudden tragedy splits the slim book, replacing Bernardo’s search for an idea of home with a search for revenge.
In the first part, makeshift father-son domesticity is recounted with enough tension to make the reader twitchy with anticipation. The second part, in which Bernardo hunts an elusive puma, I found less gripping. There are pages of brush and bramble, rocks and mountain ridges, smells and scrapes on tree bark, blood and pus and shivers, and the making of fires. Bernardo measures out his life in dwindling bullets. “The Puma had become his sole possession in this world and his sole purpose. It sustained him in body and mind.” The obsession takes on a life of its own.
It’s clear that the nonhuman world is a victim of Bernardo’s inability to deal with his difficult human feelings. The displacement of hurt on to the landscape can feel like a powerful critique of 20th-century masculinity, as when the novel draws imagistic parallels between a man shot through the eye on a French battlefield and an innocent puma cub seen through a rifle sighting. For a brief while, Bernardo is accompanied on his mission by a Mapuche man. The Mapuche resisted Spanish colonisation in Chile, and the passage establishes a contrast between capitalist destruction and more sustainable indigenous livelihoods. To spell out the point, Bernardo comes across other hunters and is outraged by their outlook: “Those cruel bastards. They do not kill the Huemul [deer] to survive, they are only money to them.”
But sometimes the book itself strays close to an escapist fantasy of retreat from the complications of society into the elemental “wilderness”. Bernardo is described as transforming into “a new person, all that had come before stripped away by what was. His eyes like globes red with desire.” At this point I was reminded, uncomfortably, of the hormonal imagery of an advert for men’s fragrance.
The voice of The Puma is more uneven and free-floating than the compelling Black Country dialect of Mercia’s Take. The prose here is stylishly elliptical: “The massive stretch of metamorphic rock, old and scarred and capped a thin white like flashes of bone amongst skin.” This composite of scientific precision and elegant simile is the dialect of literary fiction rather than of an individual character in a particular time and place. The Puma is less distinctive than Mercia’s Take. But it extends Wiles’s sincere ambition to explore marginalised histories with viscerally affecting storytelling.
