Book Review: ‘The Wall’, Marlen Haushofer (1963) — A woman against nature
Apocalypses are usually a man’s game. The idea of a fractious, war-torn or environmentally-devasted world that favours survival skills is more suited to the boys — or so we have been led to believe. Maybe we are more ready to accept men as solitary beings; even now, feminity is closely tied to the concept of family. But the Austrian author Marlen Haushofer thinks differently. Marriage is boring and unfulfilling, the pinnacle of a life of frustrated desires and misspent potential. Children are disappointing and ungrateful. And a life lived alone is hardly any worse than one spent pleasing others. Even now these ideas appear radical. Yet within Haushofer’s feminist eco-apocalypse The Wall, they find their footing.
Haushofer’s 1963 novel is an unnerving portrait of a lone woman’s survival in nature, after she becomes inexplicably trapped inside a forest on a bland holiday turned existential nightmare. Having retreated to a hunting lodge in the Austrian Alps with her nominally repulsive cousin and his wife, the narrator narrowly misses a mysterious disaster that would obliterate them, but confine her. It appears as a perpetually stretching invisible barrier that is ‘like a windowpane’.
Though the emergence of ‘the wall’ is never explained, she reasons that it is ‘a new weapon that the major powers have managed to keep secret.’ Yet it is ‘an ideal weapon, it left the earth untouched, killing only humans and animals.’ It seems to freeze the environment, turning its captures into stone; in several disturbing passages, we see residents frozen mid-activity. The narrator naturally imagines her cousin and his wife suffering the same fate but does not feel particularly bad for them. ‘Judging by the peaceful expressions, the victims hadn’t suffered; it all seemed like the most humane piece of devilry ever to have occurred to the human brain.’ Haushofer might be channelling nuclear anxiety into this novel — but her own invention feels oddly merciful, as if designed by a woman. ‘If this was death, it had come swiftly and softly, almost lovingly.’
By chance, the bavarian bloodhound Lynx has escaped the fate of his masters and returns to the lodge. Alongside the dog, a stranded cow she finds in a pasture, and a cat, our narrator slips into the rhythms of a new life cut off not only by the expectations of society, but human contact. With its lack of interplay between human characters, you might expect this novel to be boring. However, Haushofer finds depth in routine and rumination, and the narrator’s monologue — as she milks her cow, plants potatoes and beans, reticently kills deer — is convincing.
Of course, these conditions could be maddening. There is a psychological horror underlining the narrator’s fears of crop failure, the disappearance of her animals and her supernatural paranoia. And yet, she doesn’t seem to suffer so much as she did within the confines of her regular life. Her husband is scarcely mentioned, and her two children are remembered to be ‘rather unpleasant, loveless and argumentative semi-adults’. Ouch. The connection she felt with them even by the age of five had all but disappeared. Within her new animal family she at least has a sense of purpose — although it is once again tied to obligation.
It is with a deft touch Haushofer reminds us that even within nature women are never truly free. Still, the narrator — who has forgotten her own name from disuse — adapts to this environment by becoming a part of it. She dreams of giving birth to animals; she loses her feminine figure and becomes haggard, ‘more like a tree than a person’; and becomes attuned to slight changes in the ecosystem. None of these transformations or epiphanies occur without pain — they are the result of a new instinct growing within the narrator, one which she’ll never truly adapt to.
While many authors would sprinkle intrigue and unveil new information throughout the plot, Haushofer takes a starkly different approach by telling us nearly everything that happens early on. The novel’s commitment to form lends it credibility, even at the expense of dramatic tension. Nonetheless, what we’re reading is not a cut-and-dry report. As the narrator admits, she can only rely on ‘a few meagre jottings’ and her own memories aren’t to be trusted. Later, we learn that this report begins over two years after the event that produced her confinement. The strange flow of time, along with sudden switches to the present and reflections on the past, create a sometimes disorientating effect. In the decades since the novel was published, writers of sci-fi and other fiction would find cleaner methods of cutting between timeframes, yet Haushofer’s fluid approach achieves a philosophical tone. The narrator thinks time is ‘a grey and relentless net, in which every second of my life is captured.’ Still, she finds comfort in the idea that she may be the last person alive. ‘I may be in a position to murder time’. This, of course, is something of a false hope. Not even within the confines of the wall does she have the advantage over time, which is maybe one of the greater tragedies of the novel.
Though it might be slow and banal to some, The Wall is an immersive exploration of nature, the psychological lives of animals and the feminine survival instinct. Haushofer didn’t achieve much success during her lifetime, but hopefully time will work in this unique author’s favour.
