Into the mouth of the wolf by Erin Gough

Erin Gough, author of Into the mouth of the wolf, is a Sydney based writer, whose award-winning books The flywheel and Amelia Westlake have been published internationally. Into the mouth of the wolf is her third novel. Into the mouth of the wolf is a tightly structured, bingeable book that will keep the YA reader up late at night. It's murder mystery, queer romance, eco-lit., dystopian futures, parallel universes, family and friendship all wrapped up together and defying single genre categorisation. It is a strange and disturbing book. In bocca al lupa is the Italian way of wishing courage to a person. It translates as into... the mouth of the wolf. Courage is a constant requirement for characters throughout the storyline.

The setting of Into the mouth of the wolf evokes a mounting sense of unease; of threat of an unknown origin. The story opens with one of the central characters, Iris, and her mother, escaping Sydney in a Kombi and leading an on-the-run lifestyle set some time in the not too distant future. The sense of the Australian interior being one of ruined towns and infrastructure is evoked. The physical, social and cultural landscape, wracked by constant earthquakes, has undergone a terrible transformation with people leading vagrant, desperate lifestyles. Chillingly, every town features a 'Clean machine' billboard with a yellow circular logo and every citizen knows the ad... the 'Clean Machine takes your rubbish and disposes of it with care...using the everyday pressure of  natural water... delivers the harmless side product into underused spaces far beneath the surface of the earth.' The earthquakes - why?  Perhaps Gough is subliminally combining the Australian bushfire disasters with the recent Italian earthquakes as these environmental catastrophes figure largely in Into the mouth of the wolf. It is a dystopian landscape, somewhat reminiscent and just as harrowing as the shattered dystopian world of Bren MacDibble's Dogrunner. The town of Vardo however appears untouched. This is where Iris first meets Kazumi and where her mother disappears. There is another town - Glassy Bay. Are these towns mirror images of each other? Questions for the reader and the characters emerge around the strange parallel existences of these towns. Online maps that feature one town do not feature the other and vice versa. The once bush covered ridge behind Gough's Glassy Bay township and the streets once full of houses are now charred and bare. There is a beautiful bay with a hostel on one headland and a new 'packaging' factory eyesore on the other. A new addition is a watchtower on stilts and patrol boats in the bay. Why? This is just a town known for its oysters...  

There is a growing sense of the wanton and greedy activities of small town players and their possible links to international corporations and their role in environmental destruction, with the earthquakes being one of the symptoms. Iris's mother is a marine biologist and geophysicist and she is on the run - there are earthquakes, people are after them, there are murders, there is hiding and a network of previously unknown allies over and against an emergent sense of a network of evil, linked perhaps with the clean machines and the earthquakes.

Characterisation is a strength of this novel. The parents, who have been forced to lead a life on the run with their children, pass on valuable survival tools to their children. Their values seem to have been inculcated well as subsequent actions of their children in their absence reveal. The children (young adults) are each well developed characters. The representation of the growing attractions that they have for one another represent examples of differing sexual orientations quite naturally. Kazumi, a 'they' plays a more ambiguous but nevertheless crucial role in the story.  

The plot is structured into four parts; Fish don't cry, The volcano, The crossing and Into the mouth of the wolf. The Crossing is literal and symbolic too - the tear in the fabric of the world being reminiscent of Madeleine L'Engle's A wrinkle in time. Into the mouth of the wolf is neatly concluded. Almost all of the threads are tied up to the reader's satisfaction.

Into the mouth of the wolf is amongst other things a clever and funny queer coming of age story where 'going into the mouth of the wolf' is necessary in both romantic and life/death situations. It is a necessary process and living demands that you do it. Crucial perspectives are put forward about mankind and the world through Iris's pondering questions at the conclusion of the story... Will destruction continue unabated until nothing is left or... Will humanity 'limp on trying to stem the flow of greed, but almost always failing or...' Will somebody fix the world?

Into the mouth of the wolf is a strange and complex book which taps into important concerns  of Young Adults. A riveting and thought provoking, 'genre-bending' book, it will  stay with the reader's thoughts for some time. 

Themes: Climate change, Queer romance, Coming-of-age, Alternate worlds, Dystopian futures, Greed, Corruption, Hope.

Wendy Jeffrey