What it means to be human

Nothing makes humanity shine brighter than pitting it against starkly brutal and inhuman conditions. In this darkly comic collection of short stories, debut writer Diane Cook throws up different shades of the human spirit by testing her characters in unsettlingly apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic settings. It is a motif that works and, while another writer might generate only thrills, Cook goes one step further towards a genuine understanding of the reactions of ordinary people in extraordinary situations. Moreover, by exposing the border between the wild and the civilised to be a shadow line Man V. Nature extracts from the chaos in each story a distinct sense of what it means to be fully and recognisably human in all its flawed glory.

In the title story there is every suggestion that something has gone terribly wrong with the fabric of the known world and yet very little of import happens. Three middle-aged school friends are adrift on a raft on a populous shipping route, they have left loved ones behind and yet there is no hint of rescue or relief. One of them begins to wonder: “Why hadn’t they been rescued Where were the other boats Was it the end of the world What did Ross really think of him Who did Dan like better Every question he asked yielded an unsatisfying answer that woke him more.”

To pass the time and battle the creeping anxieties of the forsaken they begin to script post-apocalyptic scenarios as though for a TV show. Their reactions to the strangeness of their predicaments are portrayed in pitch-perfect prose as civil communication between them breaks down. Cruelty ricochets between the three friends as they struggle to deal with mounting absurdities and tensions, and all along the suggestion hangs heavy that something unthinkable may just have come to pass in the wider world around them.

The wider world is an uncertain place at best in this volume. Almost every story world pushes the boundaries of what would be acceptable or would simply happen in terrible times and the decency of Cook’s characters is often pressed up to breaking point against the limits of its usefulness. In Marrying Up, a mother to a giant brute must choose whether to save herself by committing a heinous act or allow her new mate and their son to abandon her to the zombie-like savages roaming the streets. In It’s Coming, a group of executives have to face tough choices when flesh-eating creatures swarm into their building.

The Way the End of Days Should Be explores the selfishness of an eminently civilised man who would begrudge his fellow man even the smallest favour while he waits for the seas to swallow him up in his plush, well-stocked and palatial mansion. However, over a series of nearly-invisible twists, the story turns to testify to the tragic urgency of companionship over survival. “Another’s need is a funny thing. It’s so often cloying. But sometimes, with the right person, it can be the most comforting thing in a day.”

Tragedies abound in this collection, and they touch the most intimate and delicate aspects of shared life. Somebody’s Baby throws up the terror of new motherhood and its extreme isolation, as a woman battles to keep, and then to find, the kidnapped babies that the people in her neighbourhood assume are a necessary sacrifice to a local bogeyman. Except at the end of it all, she is faced with the inevitable loss that accompanies motherhood, as even the recovered child of her heart is unknowable, somehow wild, and has outgrown its familiarity and intimacy to her. “If you could suddenly get back everything you’d already said goodbye to, would you want it ”

Moving On is centred on a new widow who must adapt to state mandates when it comes to grieving and marrying in an Orwellian dystopia. Echoes of George Orwell are seen also in The Not-Needed Forest as a group of young boys ejected by their society are faced with pitiless choices that make them turn on each other.

A Wanted Man takes the idea of a sexually potent alpha male and turns it on its head. In all three stories, there is a larger context of a society gone wrong, the idea that civilisation has grievously failed the people it is meant to guide and protect.

By contrast Flotsam, Girl on Girl and Meteorologist Dave Santana are set in more recognisable frameworks. In Flotsam, children’s clothes work their way into a woman’s laundry room with no explanation. Girl on Girl takes on high school drama. And Meteorologist Dave Santana is a study in a woman’s perversity, an examination of a mind gone, somehow, sour.

The Mast Year is typical of this collection with its absurd premise and entirely believable fallout as a woman faced with too much good fortune must somehow reconcile the needs and demands of perfect strangers who are attracted to her success.

Authentic, unique, unconventional and heroic, this collection of stories forces its characters to stare into the vertiginous chasm of their primitive selves even as they are stripped down by experience to their most basic. The existential learning that this collection reveals is understated and subtle yet hard won. Nor is the challenge thrown up in Man V. Nature resolved but, as Diane Cook suggests, when human beings struggle against themselves, when the barriers between wildness and civilisation drop, then all the blood and tears resulting from this battle will somehow have been worthwhile and meaningful because they can be distilled to glean some kind of new knowledge about what it means to be human.

Karishma Attari is a Mumbai based book critic and author of I See You a coming-of-age horror novel