Our Bookshelf - Once There Were Wolves

Author - Charlotte McConaghy

Year of publication - 2021

Fresh from reading McConaghy’s bestselling Wild Dark Shore, I was delighted to receive her earlier novel Once There Were Wolves from a friend who thought I might enjoy it. Happily, they were right. Our latest Bookshelf pick provides a vividly-described setting and a highly satisfying, if a little predicatable, narrative.

Fascinated by wolves since childhood, Inti Flynn is now the director of a rewilding project in Scotland, the aim of which is to reintroduce wolves to the wilderness of the Cairngorms. Inti is confident of the plan, dismissing locals who fear that the wolves represent a threat to their livelihood. However, with a traumatised twin sister to look after and deepening feelings for someone she isn’t sure she can trust, Inti comes across a body in the woods and is terrified the blame lies with her charges.

Just as with Wild Dark Shore, McConaghy brings the reader to a remote setting. Rather than the former’s desolate island in the middle of the pacific, this time we are in a relatively isolated part of Scotland. As if to reinforce this, she specifically avoids mentioning any nearby towns or well-known Scottish landmarks. We are clearly meant to feel as lost and alone as the main character and her sister do. Even the weather has been presented as an impediment to the entrance of the outside world, since most of the novel takes place under a blanket of snow.

Though the protagonist lacks a certain warmth, McConaghy creates a deeply sympathetic character in Inti, whose condition makes her uniquely vulnerable and allows the reader the rare opportunity to experience the emotions and sensations felt by non point-of-view characters. Rather less is revealed about Aggie, Inti’s sister and apparently the survivor of something awful before the events of the novel. Even so, Aggie is presented as more objectively likeable than her twin, at least in occasional flashbacks to happier times. The sisters, by virtue of their relationship and shared upbringing, provide balance to the story, and in my view have very well-written and fleshed-out personalities. Nevertheless, I found their eventual character development to be a little thin. Specifically, I felt that both Inti and Aggie would have benefitted from a little more personal growth, the extent of which for both of them is boiled down to the last few pages and is frustratingly vague. Not all stories can have happy endings, of course, and nobody is saying that this ending is not happy, but I certainly didn’t have the feeling that either of them became different people to any measurable extent as a result of the novel’s events. By way of example, Inti spends much of the story ignoring a hugely important issue, but despite the reader being aware of almost every feeling and sensation she experiences, this issue is left as something that merely ‘happens to her’, rather than developing the character into someone who takes charge of her own personal life.