Wolves: A remarkable novel in spite of, and because of, its flaws

Wolves by Simon Ings

“When we fall in love with someone, we fall in love first with their world. Sometimes love for the person follows. Sometimes not.”

Four pages into Simon Ings‘s newest novel, Wolves, and I am already underlining things with a pencil for their insight into the human psyche, something which, if I am to be honest, I find lacking in many genre novels and am most likely to find in the so called literary novels. Wolves has been hailed as a triumphal return to science fiction by UK-based author Ings, even though the speculative elements which are characteristic of science fiction are sparse and only come into importance toward the final two thirds of the novel. Wolves is at the same time a coming of age tale and a whodunnit story, but even more than those archetypes, it is the story of Conrad and Michel, two childhood friends very different from one another, but whose bond proves durable even when the passage of the years and the inevitable concerns of adulthood weaken their childhood connection.

Conrad is a passive boy that grew up in a nondescript town in what has to be the UK for the gloomy climate that pervades the story. His parents bought a hotel when they got married, and despite all obstacles it has managed to barely maintain its doors open. Conrad’s mother suffers from bouts of mental mania, locking herself in the top floor of the hotel to work on various projects which she is certain will bring financial fortitude to the family but which inevitably prove to be a failure, and, toward the later stages of her life, abandoning her family to join a female-only protest camp near a military base from which she is constantly having to be rescued from due to her inability to take care of herself. It’s a heavy strain weighing the family down, but Conrad and his father have adapted their lives to her manic episodes as best they can, until one day, as she abandons the family once more to join the protest camp, Conrad discovers his mother’s body in the trunk of his father’s car, an apparent suicide.

That first sentence I quoted earlier proves to be the key to decipher the contents of this novel, and why Conrad acts they way he acts. As a boy Conrad is in love with Michel’s world, the world that grew out of Michel having lost his father in combat against an undescribed enemy and compensating that lack of a fatherly influence with a romantic idea of masculinity that manifests itself as a constant preparation, both mentally and phisically, for what he sees as the inevitable end of the world, what he calls The Fall. While Conrad can see through the futility of preparing for the end of times, his love for Michel makes him join Michel’s training and speculation on how the world might come to an end.

Conrad has enough introspective skill, and the honesty needed to go with that, to admit just how in love with a person’s world he is, and not to shy away from problems that arise from having that world suddenly lack the luster that it once had. When we first meet Conrad he has just come out of an accident in which his girlfriend Mandy has lost both her arms, and while he isn’t initially fazed by that change of circumstances, the strain that that loss puts on Mandy brings up certain mental characteristics of her that Conrad does not enjoy, making him realize he isn’t in love with her world anymore, with the seven toothpastes she uses so she can have a different flavor every day of the week, her little blue bottles of essential oils gathering dust on her bathroom shelf.

Falling in love with a person is hard. Falling in love with a world is easy. Confusing the two loves is easier still.

The first hundred pages of Wolves are used solely to explore Conrad’s love for other people’s worlds. Ings does an amazing job at bringing to life his characters, making you, if not fall in love, at least be incredibly sympathetic to Conrad’s predicament, his not entirely cynical worldview but honest and unapologetic. The science fictional elements come into play after those hundred pages, where Ings shows us a near future where Virtual Reality has been replaced by a more pervasive technology, Augmented Reality, which as the novel progresses becomes more and more a commodity, and also a problem. Conrad rides that commoditization when he founds a company with a brilliant engineer from the company he was working at to build and market publicity experiences tailored for AR, which allows him to see first hand the impact the evolution of that technology has in the world. It also brings him closer once more to Michel, as the post-apocalyptic novel he was working on becomes a bestseller, and later on, a media franchise.

Despite the genial characterization and insight of the first third of Wolves, and the interweaving layers of technological change and personal relationships of the second third, the last hundred pages of the novel fail to deliver an ending that satisfies the promises that were laid out before. A plot reveal concerning one character from Conrad’s past feels unrealistic (all things considered), and towards the end Conrad behaves in a way that goes against his character’s previously established beliefs, perhaps taking a bit to the extreme that falling with a person’s world motif. The way the mystery of Conrad’s mother death is also solved unsatisfactorily, even if that plotline never feels as central to the story’s plot as the back copy of the book would led us to believe, or even the technological thriller it is trying to sell. More interestingly, the imagery of the wolves never comes into play, which makes me wonder whether the book should not have been titled “The Flood” or something along those lines.

For all the flaws of the last third of the book, I have to say I felt strangely drawn into Wolves. Even if the plot moving the story forward is fairly nonexistent and badly handled toward the end, the characters and their relationships are strong enough to carry the whole book forward. Ings strikes a interesting balance between being preachy and insightful, and his vision of commoditized AR technology feels plausible enough to believe that that is a possibility in our own world. It might be a book that will not appeal to everyone, but it is an ambitious and insightful novel that shines a light on the relationships we carve in this world, be they love or friendship, without being apologetic for showing things as they truly are. Even taking into account its flaws, Wolves is a remarkable novel.