Land Beneath the Waves
Nic Wilson
Rooted in ecological and historical depth, Land Beneath the Waves is more than a memoir. It explores how chronic illness shapes personal identity and shifts our relationship with nature and place.
Land Beneath the Waves subverts dominant tropes in nature writing. Here, nature is a comfort, not a cure or conquest. Unlike narratives where the author ‘conquers the wild,’ this book stays close to home. While bedbound, birds are a talisman; “Tumbling out of the sky like it’s fallen from heaven. Down behind my neighbour’s house, all forked tail and retracted wings, plunging. Bigger than my pain. I sit up and lean across the pillows to catch the red kite as it rises and passes the window, so close it almost fills the panes.”
Extending this subversion, Wilson also weaves the domestic as part of nature writing in another counter to the often male-dominated genre: “Clothes form these shifting piles all around the house, like mountain ranges thrown up by the unpredictable movement of tectonic plates…Such proliferating heaps have an advantage: the higher they grow the more weight presses the garments at the bottom of the pile. I’m harnessing the power of gravity to flatten Col’s work shirts in a process we call geological ironing.”
This is not another tale where nature serves as a remedy. Here, nature is neither hero nor healer, but a constant companion. She pays close attention to the near; these connections to the natural world, like the bombweed in her childhood garden, provide tendrils to her memories.
This memoir is refreshingly honest. Wilson lays her storytelling cards on the table by opening her book with, “I am not a memoirist.” She tells us that she struggles to remember. Yet together we navigate her childhood and adult trauma. The structure of the story is more mosaic than map. Paths criss-cross between her recollections and her family’s, meander over meadows to encounter historical and literary heroes, and we sneak down snickets into her imagination, where we meet ‘The Goblin King.’ This effectively changes the pace, mirroring the experience of living with a chronic illness.
Memories are slippery, as she seeks to understand her physical and mental health. She unearths her past, bringing us along on the journey. Even though the path is dark, she infuses the narrative with light. As she finds a way to live with her condition, she asks, “How hard could baking gluten-free bread be? You know the three little pigs? Well, those first two dimwits would have lived to see another day if they’d built with my focaccia instead of straw and sticks. No matter how hard the big bad wolf had huffed and puffed, their gluten-free houses would have remained standing.”
We walk by Wilson’s side as she undertakes counselling, and it is here that the writing is most visceral. This book lays bare the frustrations of misdiagnosis and the shortcomings of a flawed medical system. She heartbreakingly writes, “When I open out the years, any surviving memories of my mum are as fragile as paper snowflakes. The tears that her illness rent in our relationship nearly half-century ago once unfolded, unleash a snowstorm of perforations.” Sharing her words with her mother is one of the book’s most powerful passages.
Land Beneath the Waves is a love letter. To her mum, whose story of chronic illness is wrapped around her childhood like brambles and ivy. To her dad, whose moth madness and geometric misunderstandings are a brightness in the dark. To the landscape and its wildlife, we must pay attention.
Above all, it is a brave and beautiful love letter to herself and those living with chronic illness. An acceptance of shifting inner and outer landscapes alongside a commitment to keep listening, learning, and walking local paths, even when the ground shifts beneath the waves. This is an essential invitation to witness the delicate endurance in land and spirit.
Reviewed by Vanessa Wright
Vanessa writes about beachcombing and birds found on the shores of South Uist, and was a runner-up in the BBC Countryfile New Nature Writer of the Year competition.