Kelly Anderson's debut novel, The Wild Beneath, is an astonishing act of imagination, firmly rooted in the physical world of a small coastal village and in the ocean itself. With threads of the magical laced throughout, a limited cast of characters wrestles for balance between land and sea and in their relationships with one another. Ever surprising, this spellbinding story holds both science and wonder, always in close touch with the natural world.
The Wild Beneath opens with a scene of beauty and terror. "She begins with a lullaby that sends coyotes fleeing up mountains. Honeybees abandon their hives to the shrill calls of songbirds and barking dogs. Beneath the seafloor, the tectonic plates loosen and rearrange.... A liquid mountain rises in the Pacific Northwest." The earthquake and tsunami destroy a human settlement and take many lives; the effect is power and pain and loss, described in harrowing detail, but "the ocean will call it a song." The ocean is never far from the consciousness of Anderson's characters.
Annie MacLeod is 19, and it is an accident of timing that she happens to be ashore with her grandmother Ruth when the tsunami hits their Canadian village, Hale's Landing. In all her life, she has spent very few nights away from her parents and their sailboat, Amphitrite. "Maybe they're not dead," Ruth tells Annie, although hope fades with time. The two women scour sand and scum from Ruth's cabin and sift the detritus on the beach for mementos or for anything useful to meeting their most basic needs. Annie suffers from blinding grief and a change in her relationship to the world around her, due to events just before the tsunami that are not immediately revealed. She's also experiencing a fracture in her relationship with Evan, the boy she's grown up with, the two of them pushed and pulled like tides. Evan has spent summers on Amphitrite since they were both small, but for most of the year he belongs to the land, where his father, Isaac Hale, runs the timber company that gives the town its name and livelihood. Where Annie is accustomed to listening to the ocean's nuanced song, Evan listens to the trees.
Then, at the edge of the land and the end of the world as she's known it, Annie encounters a new arrival walking slowly down the beach. Washed up on the shore, stark naked, about her own age, with "a startling vacancy about him, not fully there, looking past her. His irises are sea-urchin grey with streaks of silver." He accepts the name Annie offers him: Walker. It seems to Annie that he emits a hum, a sound she feels deep in her bones, that soothes the parts of her that have been jangled by recent events. "This out-of-place person in front of her... who is he? Why does she want him to like everything about her?" Walker is tall and handsome, but almost above those descriptors: he seems elementally tuned to the ocean in a way that speaks to Annie's bones. He is quiet and patient, he makes her feel safe in a different way than Evan does. In an entirely disordered world, Annie--raised by her two loving parents and by the sea, mostly outside of human society--is unsure of where to turn. Toward her best friend and first love, who offers both stability and complication on land? Or toward the strange newcomer, whose pulse feels like home, and who beckons her to return to the ocean?
With lyricism and a quiet sense of awe, The Wild Beneath reveals a careful focus on balance, rhythm, push-and-pull relationships. It is inhabited by many paired forces: Annie's parents, Evan's parents, the land and the ocean, Walker and Evan, the question of whether one stays or goes. Anderson orders the book by the tides: Low, Slack, Flood, High, Ebb. Within each section, there are shifts in time: Now, Before, Six years after, Forty years before. These cycles punctuate Annie's experiences, which are highly keyed to the natural world: humpback whales, tide pools, sea stars, sand dollars, wind. Flashbacks also offer glimpses of Annie's father, who was himself once a young person navigating the push-and-pull of land and sea. He loved the ocean, but Annie's mother seemed preternaturally linked to it--like Walker now. Annie's upbringing on the boat was one version of balancing those two approaches; now in adulthood, she must chart her own. In perhaps another cycle, Annie's life represents an attempt to balance her two parents' experiences of their world, but readers will wait for most of the book to discover what those experiences were.
Anderson offers a novel that is quietly astounding, beautiful even when it conveys profound pain. With unhurried but propulsive pacing, she draws readers into a plot that is both bewildering and bewitching. The Wild Beneath asks wise, subtle questions about the line between science and magic, and suggests that both are found in the natural world. Annie's struggles with grief, with coming of age, with tough choices, and with a sense of being pulled in two conflicting directions at once, are both universally recognizable and shockingly unique. Her story is haunting and unforgettable. --Julia Kastner