Wild at Heart

A woman from Toronto is standing outside a log cabin in interior Alaska, several hours from anywhere, and the man who brought her here is in the air again.

A settled ending was promised and the logistics of one turn up. The first book had a dying father and a deadline. This one has mortgage payments, plus a charter business that will not start itself, a winter longer than she budgeted for, and a relationship that has to survive being ordinary.

Domestic accumulation has to be enough, because nothing else is on offer. No crisis arrives, no rival appears, nobody is ill, and either the slow arithmetic of a life being assembled holds the reader or she is reading four hundred pages of somebody being cold and lonely on purpose.

An antagonist that is a climate cannot be met in a room. The difficulty follows from that. The problem is weather, distance and a work schedule, none of which can be confronted, argued with or defeated. So the conflict has no scene where it occurs. It distributes itself across months, and a novel whose trouble cannot be staged has to manufacture incident from neighbours and wildlife instead.

Jonah flies. Jonah is gone. Jonah comes back tired and stays for a stretch that is never long enough, and Tucker is honest that a man doing the thing he was born to do is not automatically a man who is available.

Calla's mother is the ghost in every chapter, and the novel puts her there deliberately. A woman who fled these exact conditions, married to a man with this exact job, and the daughter now walking voluntarily into the arrangement her mother could not survive. The question is open and Tucker refuses to close it early.

Muriel is a genuine achievement of characterisation. A neighbour whose kindness is indistinguishable from an invasion, determined to convert a city woman into an Alaskan whether or not she consents, and impossible to resent for more than a page.

Roy is the other pole and the better one. Hostile, armed, entirely unwilling to be befriended, and the novel earns every inch of ground it takes with him rather than granting a thaw for narrative convenience.

Practicalities are where this book is at its best. Water that has to be hauled, a generator that fails, a road that closes, and animals that turn up in the yard with intentions. Tucker treats infrastructure as characterisation, and a reader learns what a person is by what she can be bothered to do at minus thirty.

Sequel romance has a known problem, which is that the couple is already together and the tension has to come from somewhere. Tucker declines to manufacture a misunderstanding, which is admirable, and the price is a middle stretch that is very quiet indeed.

Alaska is written by somebody who has done the research and resists the postcard. Beautiful and tedious and expensive, with the beauty never offered as compensation for the tedium, and the small town rendered as a set of relationships rather than as a backdrop.

She said she could live here. The book takes the sentence seriously enough to test it.