Nature, read in truth and claw

THE epigraph for T.C. Boyle's new short-story collection - Henry David Thoreau's In Wildness is the Preservation of the World - seems perversely counter-intuitive.

THE epigraph for T.C. Boyle's new short-story collection - Henry David Thoreau's In Wildness is the Preservation of the World - seems perversely counter-intuitive.

Surely the world's preservation relies on wildness's opposite. It is chaos and disorder in the natural world and those violent atavisms of human nature that we must tame to survive.

The 19th-century nature writer and his literary descendent eloquently disagree. For them, wildness is an ineradicable aspect of nature, human or otherwise.

The 14 short stories that make up Wild Child imagine encounters between the wildness and civilisation that range from the literal to the oblique.

Each narrative, however, shares a sharp admonitory edge. The individuals in Boyle's stories struggle to maintain a personal equilibrium, between impulse and acculturation, between the self's needs and society's demands, to escape being destroyed by the imbalance that results.

This might sound doctrinaire in another author's hands.

But Boyle's prose, itself an instrument of controlled wildness, works to complicate moral simplicities, bending them into narratives that are always elegant in form, if often raw in subject matter.

Here is the first sentence of Sin Dolor, the story, told by a local doctor, of a Mexican boy born without the ability to feel pain: He came into the world like all the rest of them - like us, that is - brown as an iguana and flecked with the detritus of afterbirth, no more remarkable than the date stamped on the morning's newspaper, but when I cleared his throat and slapped his buttocks, he didn't make a sound. Openings such as this are the literary equivalent of being side-swiped, the reader whiplashed to proper attention. Suspense is embedded in the infant's untaken breath. It makes the following sentence as necessary as oxygen, for the reader as for the child.

And, of course, the ordinariness claimed by the narrator is anything but. The image of a newborn baby compared to an iguana is as creepy as it is carefully chosen. It anticipates what we will soon learn: that he will grow up to be alien, trapped in a body that is more scar than skin, a freak of nature who is publicly tortured by his family for money in the surrounding towns until his early death.

Here, as elsewhere in Wild Child, Boyle manipulates narrative and language to brilliant effect. Yet the narrator's description of the boy's short and tragic life develops its own troubling counterpoint. The doctor tries to lure the boy away from his family, not just to save him but to offer him up as a medical marvel to colleagues at research institutions. We end the tale cloven in two: horrified by those callous peasants but unable to approve of the motives of the doctor who directs us to condemn them.

Many of the stories call a halt in this uneasy moral territory. In Balto, a 12-year-old girl is encouraged to lie in court after a car accident for which her well-heeled drunk of a father was ultimately responsible. "There are two kinds of truth," the lawyer tells her, "good truths and hurtful ones." Yet faced with his question something gives: She lifted her chin then to look at the judge and heard the words coming out of her mouth as if they'd been planted there, telling the truth, the hurtful truth ... so loud she might have been shouting it at the man with the camera at the back ... The truth, in this instance, does not arise out adherence to some cultural norm but from a furious assertion of selfhood on the part of a child on the cusp of puberty who feels she is taken for granted.

Her vehement gesture reminds us that those individuals and structures that presume to preserve order, whether the father at home or the lawyer in court, can be shaken by calling on a law that lies beyond them: a sense of justice planted rather than grafted by custom and time.

The final and most direct statement of this conflict is found in the story Wild Child, which returns us to the Languedoc region in France in 1797, the fifth year of the new French republic. In it, a group of hunters sight a naked boy, un enfant sauvage, cracking acorns in the woods. Briefly captured, he escapes and manages to elude other humans for years afterwards, becoming something of a living myth in the surrounding countryside. Then he is caught once again, and "given over to science, and through science, to celebrity".

We discover that he is the youngest child of a family of peasants, abandoned by his stepmother as an infant and grown to boyhood alone in the forest. He is without language, "feral - a living, breathing atavism", and the public is horrified and entranced by his otherness. For the naturalist sent to observe him, the boy is a figure in whom the uncivilised origins of humanity are discernible. He is "untouched by culture, by awareness, by human feeling".

The press wonders whether he is "Rousseau's Noble Savage or just another Aborigine? Or perhaps thrilling conjecture the ... werewolf of legend?" And for the Parisian philosopher who spends five years teaching him, the boy is a blank slate, the tabula rasa of Locke and Condillac on which one may paint their vision of the human.

But the great minds of the enlightenment are of no help. The boy is turned out of nature but cannot be admitted into society; he never learns to speak. Why, then, do we close Wild Child convinced this creature is the closest thing to a human being to appear in its pages? Because Boyle's sad and savage lessons show us that our desire to tame wildness is not evidence of strength; rather, it is a pettiness we long to expiate.

Geordie Williamson is chief literary critic of The Australian.