The Wilder Path – Book Review
The Wilder Path, by Deborah Tomkins, June 2025. Aurora Metro Books, ISBN: 9781910798683, 296 pages. RRP: £11.99 (paperback)
Writing almost ten years ago, Amitav Ghosh called these times “The Great Derangement” in his important book of that title, alerting us to how “climate change casts a much smaller shadow within the landscape of literary fiction than it does even in the public arena”. So he imagines readers in the future concluding that ours “was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognising the realities of their plight”. Significantly, Ghosh provides an explanation for this: “Challenges that climate change poses for the contemporary writer … derive ultimately from the grid of literary forms and conventions that came to shape the narrative imagination in precisely that period when the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere was rewriting the destiny of the earth”. Too many writers are still stuck in that past. Notwithstanding that climate change is featuring more in art and literature as time moves on, our public awareness is still deranged inasmuch as it tends to remain a merely circumstantial issue in contemporary fiction.
This makes the work of writers such as our own Deborah Tomkins all the more to be valued. Deborah has been a key member of Green Christian for many years and until recently was a trustee and co-chair. Her concern for the psychological impact of the climate and nature emergency led her to develop the Deep Waters programme. This became a Green Christian resource which has helped many people navigate their complex emotional responses to climate breakdown through the lens of Christian faith. Deborah began writing climate fiction in 2007. Aerth, published at the beginning of 2025, was reviewed by Luke Kennard in the Daily Telegraph: “This novella, so concisely written, is a triumph: both an intelligent sci-fi thriller and a thought-provoking parable.” The Wilder Path was published later the same year and both have won awards.
It felt to me that The Wilder Path was addressing in narrative form the very issues that are explored in Deep Waters, viz. how the climate emergency can (and inevitably will) seriously mess with our lives. I’m an avid novel reader and this one quickly drew me in. I felt for the main character as she began to lose her equilibrium. The book is effectively structured with successive chapters telling how she was thrown from complacency into febrile activism and finally into a perfect storm of extreme weather. Initially I wondered about the believability of the way she was described and likewise the behaviour and personalities of her husband and other members of the family. But, of course, times of crisis do knock us sideways and we may well behave strangely. This is a compelling story and, perhaps most importantly, one in which the Earth and its climate are at its centre – as of course they truly are for us all.
Andrew Norman
Green Christian Chaplain
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