History of Wolves

Nature, throughout the novel, is so present that it feels like another character; Linda spends most of her time within nature and interprets her thoughts and feelings through her understanding of the natural world. Winter and ice, though, are especially and significantly present, even into the summer months. Fridlund uses winter to mirror the icy and at times suffocating tone of the novel. Snow, particularly, is used to convey the isolation and monotony the characters experience: “Winter boomeranged back. Outside: four feet of snow sealed in a shiny crust.” (21). Most of all, the cold and empty landscape of winter reflects Linda’s emotional landscape, representing her inability to connect and communicate with others. Before Linda meets the Gardners, her days carry the dullness and loneliness represented by the oppressing presence of snow. Just after the Gardners move in, though, the temperatures suddenly rise, defrosting the frozen lake between Linda and them: “A wet sheen appeared across the surface of the ice, and in the late afternoons you could hear the whole lake pop and zizzle. Cracks appeared” (24). The thawing of winter can represent the hope that Linda has found someone to connect to, and the ice on the lake represents the contrast between surface and depth. The thawing of the frozen lake serves as foreshadowing; just as the Gardners’s arrive, the surface of the lake gives way to its greater depth, insinuating a similar icy depth hides beneath the seemingly perfect surface of the Gardners. 

Fridlund develops the motif of winter into a symbol through Linda’s dream the night before Paul dies; in her dream, Linda watches Paul crawl onto his belly across the newly frozen lake, despite it being the middle of summer: “elbowing his way onto the thin sheet of ice, and I realized at last how cold it was, how the smell of snow thinned the air in my nostrils, how my fingertips were already going a little numb” (186). Linda attempts to follow Paul out onto the ice, but it breaks beneath her weight—this is one place that Linda cannot follow him. The dream foreshadows Paul’s death, warning Linda that something is terribly wrong in the house. Though she has taught him how to survive in the woods, showing him to crawl on his belly across thin ice, she cannot protect him from the danger outside the woods—the danger in his very home. The ice symbolizes the imminent peril Paul is in, the coldness Linda feels is reminiscent of death itself. 

Paul’s death is revealed two pages into the novel, becoming a steadily present motif as the novel works toward the cause. The novel begins by describing that before she’d known Paul, Linda had “known just one person who’d gone from living to dead” (4). She witnesses the death of a teacher, and while the rest of her classmates recoil in fear and disgust, she approaches him, seemingly undisturbed. The novel continues with imagery of illness through similes: “Even the gifted and talented kids were unmoved, clicking their mechanical pencils until the lead protruded obscenely, like hospital needles” (6). Though she hasn’t yet revealed Paul’s illness, Fridlund reminds the reader that is ever present, building up to the climactic reveal. 

The novel spends the first half (Health) carefully avoiding the cause of Paul’s death. The second half (Science), goes into painstaking detail of what he suffered, making a point to demonstrate why he died. Fridlund accomplishes this with bitter irony; the father of the child, a scientist, willfully overlooks the science behind his son’s illness. By making illness and death an inescapable motif, Fridlund increases the suspenseful tone of this quasi-thriller and conveys one central message: Paul’s illness was always there, in plain sight.

During the time Linda spends with Paul, he is working on building a city called Europa, named after one of Jupiter’s moons. However, Paul claims it to be a city where nobody lives, “it’s just a city” (42). Linda can respect that because she, better than anyone, knows that a city can exist without inhabitants. The day Paul dies, Linda wished she had told him that “[n]o one lives in Europa […] Not yet, maybe not ever […] it’s just a city, with trains and diggers and bulldozers and roads” (143).The city works to symbolize the worlds both Linda and Paul live in; for Linda, the commune which has long since been emptied of its inhabitants, is very similar to Europa. They both have all the practical functions of a city—the structures, the roads—but are devoid of any living thing. For Paul, Europa represents his world; he’s been isolated from the outside world and deprived of contact with children his own age. However, Europa initially represents hope for Paul and Linda—a place for two outsiders to come together. After Patra and Leo take Paul away, hours before he dies, Linda is careful to set up Europa just the way he likes it, so it’s ready for him when he returns. Paul dies, and Linda must leave, ensuring that Europa will indeed be an empty city forever.