Gone to the Forest

Gone to the Forest is a delicate and fractured piece of writing. It is vulnerable and alive and full of hurt. It's brilliant. Working in the space between fable and history, Gone to the Forest takes place on a farm in an unknown location that has been colonised for decades. Be it a country in Africa or South America or South East Asia, it doesn't matter. That is irrelevant. What is important is what happens when a perfect but tenuous idyll is threatened by outside forces.

On this farm, Tom comes of age, is betrothed by his father to a girl and learns to live off the land. He is sheltered and has never been to the city. When a volcano erupts, this starts off a chain of events that leads to the country rising up in revolution against the white settlers who have stolen the land from them for centuries. Tom, his betrothed and his father must learn to survive.

The beauty of the book is that it takes outside influences and forces such as natural disasters and rebellions and puts them in the background of a very quiet and disturbing story of a father and son relationship, of a forced coming-of-age and of the lowest ebbs of humanity. Kitamura's controlled prose is both sparse and beautifully controlled in its ability to get to the core of humanity's inability to coexist without conflict, both big and small, and in the shadow of years of colonialism.