Daniel Wiles’s second novel, The Puma, is a serious and intense historical novel about a father with limited resources who attempts to break a cycle of violence. Set in the early 1950s, Bernardo brings his young son James from England to the Patagonian woods where he grew up. James chatters about becoming a footballer, but Bernardo is haunted by memories of a violent childhood.
The plot moves between present and past, revealing the violence Bernardo fled and the violence he encountered as a civilian in the Blitz and a British army medic in Normandy. A sudden tragedy splits the slim book, replacing Bernardo’s search for home with a search for revenge. The first part depicts makeshift father-son domesticity with tension, but the second part, where Bernardo hunts an elusive puma, is less gripping.
The nonhuman world becomes a victim of Bernardo’s inability to deal with his feelings. The displacement of hurt onto the landscape critiques 20th-century masculinity, drawing parallels between a man shot through the eye on a French battlefield and a puma cub seen through a rifle sighting. A Mapuche man briefly accompanies Bernardo, contrasting capitalist destruction with indigenous livelihoods.
However, the book sometimes strays into escapist fantasy, with Bernardo transforming into “a new person, all that had come before stripped away”. The prose is stylishly elliptical but less distinctive than Wiles’s debut, Mercia’s Take. Nevertheless, The Puma extends Wiles’s ambition to explore marginalised histories with viscerally affecting storytelling.
