Articles Available Online

‘Cetaceans are women’s allies in the war against patriarchy because patriarchy holds the cetaceans down with us,’ explains the earnest and slightly irritating Erin, nineteen-year-old protagonist of Abi Andrews’s debut novel ‘Orcas travel in matriarchal pods,’ she elaborates, by way of explanation ‘The root of the word dolphin, delphus, means womb’   In the journals that became Walden, Henry David Thoreau wrote, ‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach’ Thoreau was by no means the first to celebrate the transcendental purity of the ‘wilderness’ or the spiritual benefits of an outdoorsy survivalism, but his 1854 work helped to print these values onto the American self-image In 1992, a heavily annotated copy of Walden was found alongside the remains of Chris McCandless, who walked out of his privileged California upbringing and hitched to Alaska And Into the Wild, the 2007 film based on his journals, has built for McCandless a cult following and a divisive legacy Was he a messianic figure akin to Thoreau, inspiring a generation of travellers to reject technology in favour of a lived purity in nature? Or was he a fool with a merely sentimental understanding of the wilderness he idealised?   Andrews’s novel participates in this survivalist legacy, though uneasily Erin has left her parents’ house to escape the ‘grid-owned and regimented spaces’ of the British Midlands She’s watched Into the Wild and read Walden, as well as On the Road and The Call of the Wild She wants in on the tradition As a young feminist, however, she’s wary of the ambivalent heritage of these ‘straight white men’, and though intoxicated with the wilderness narrative, she can’t help but imagine ‘how it would have been different if the guy had been a girl’ She cites a cohort of female, proto-feminist adventurers in passing – Calamity Jane, Freya Stark, Nellie Bly – but these women simply do not compel Erin as does, say, the Unabomber, whose eco-terrorist manifesto she knows in detail   The journey, on cargo ships