Skip to main content

Blue Ticket is a Ticket to Nowheresville

It's quite annoying to break up a really good reading run with something so very meh. I got an early vibe that I wasn't going to like this book, which morphed into increasing irritation. I should have just stopped, but it was so brutally fast paced that by the time I was really fed up I was already at 65% and it seemed silly not to hold on for one more hour of reading. 

This received praise putting it alongside the The Handmaid's Tale, which adds weight to my theory that modern literary types should read some genre fiction as a palate cleanser more often. If this was a self-published book I'd never slag it off on here, but it was freakin' Booker Prize nominated. 

So, what's it about?

Calla grows up in a country in which girls are separated once they reach puberty. They are given a ticket that either marks them out for career or for motherhood and then the career girls have to run for their lives through wilderness to reach a city. Wherever they end up, they will be housed and educated by the state, and depending on how they do they will be assigned work. A relatively free life follows, with career women able to do anything they want except have children. 

(It's only when you write something like this down that you realise it's stupider than you even recall.)

Calla is a fuckup who believes she has been denied the motherhood she craves because she is somehow unsuitable. She desperately bypasses her contraceptive device and gets pregnant... and eventually has to go on the run. 

Important dystopian lottery that controls your whole future, fair enough. It's a common trope that we've seen in multiple stories. Shirley Jackson's The Lottery started the ball rolling, which directly inspired The Hunger Games, which inspired many more. I myself studied a story about teenagers taking an intelligence exam with deadly consequences for GCSE English. This lottery for motherhood fits in nicely.

The difference is that in all those other stories there's a reason given, or at least implied. The Lottery allows people to unleash their anger and misery on a scapegoat rather than the system itself, The Hunger Games is literally a bread and circuses model, papering over a brutally unfair society with entertainment for the wealthy and hope for the desperate. One might find The Handmaid's Tale horrifying, but it's not hard to understand how that society got to that place. 

What possible reason is there for this, other than for the author to spark a debate? The more you think the more pointless it gets. Babies are special enough to make everyone stop what they are doing in the street to give coins to the fathers, but there are clearly no birth rate issues. If so, why forbid half the population from procreating? The white ticket baby-making women aren't pushed to have more children than average (it's not a baby farm situation) so the population numbers must be falling. Yet this has been happening for at least two generations so it's clearly not. The system is a lottery, so there's no genetic or background reason for who gets which ticket. 

People are so controlled that they have mandatory therapy sessions with an agent of the state, but the society seems otherwise free, with people going on holidays to other (freer) countries and having all the traits of a western capitalist society. Women seem to be the only thing controlled and yet the 'free' women live lives on par with any in a modern democratic society. There is no control around religion, sexuality, sex, or any other aspect of life outside of some propaganda that boils down to 'giving birth is gross'. Calla had choice about her career to a certain level, and lives a comfortable life with a nice apartment and parties to go to. 

They send young girls into the woods to find their way to a city and a new life, for no reason I can understand, which is treated as a rite of passage. They forbid blue ticket women from procreating but don't sterilise them, only pop in a bit of metal that can be removed with kitchen tongs and a bottle of gin. Yet only a handful of women want children enough to try and remove it? Bollocks. 

When a blue ticket does get pregnant the state's answer is to... give them a backpack and let them go on the run like they are on Celebrity Hunted. The main character has already been abroad before - why not go on holiday again and then defect? It just doesn't make sense, and so it's hard to have much sympathy for the characters complaining about it all.

That pointlessness means that there's no room for nuance, so it comes down to a vague women's bodies shouldn't be controlled and no one is 'designed' for motherhood debate, which is an argument that it's hard to imagine anyone who chose to read this book disagreeing with. And when I say 'debate'... at one point a white-ticket shows up in their little blue-ticket pregnancy hideout and basically goes 'urrrgh, babies are YUCK why would you want to?' and then runs away. Meanwhile pregnancy is treated by the text as the most fundamental act of womanhood. 

Just off the top of my head this book could have played with the issues around the current Millennial and Gen Z women who are priced out of children, or not having them due to climate fears. Or it could have followed a white ticket woman who wants to abandon the children she never wanted. I read an interview where the author talks about how they personally felt that their body clock triggered their baby-desire so strongly in their mid-thirties that they almost resented it - why not write a book about that, instead of whatever this is?

Style wise, it's that dialogue-free stream-of-consciousness that's fashionable right now. Bit of an affectation but it doesn't bother me. I read Motherthing immediately after this, which has the same style, yet revealed more about the character and her husband in one page than this entire book did about all of its characters together. 

Is it readable? Yes. 

It is worth reading? I'd take my chances on something else.

I write this blog purely for my own enjoyment, not to make a career or become a content creator. Even so, I put a lot of work into it. If you fancy supporting me on Ko-Fi, that would be incredibly cool of you!
Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

So... How Many Books Do I Actually Own? A TBR Masterlist

The one natural law of being a book-lover is that you never, ever address just how big your TBR pile is. That, as far as we are all concerned, is a private matter between our bank accounts and God.  Well, no longer! As part of my Read What You Own challenge, I've been picking up books I ordinarily wouldn't have got to for years, if ever. I therefore decided to catalogue the books I own, across all formats.  Let the judgement commence!  This is going to be an ongoing list of what I actually own - not as a guilt-inducing tool, but a reminder of the wealth of options I already have. Notes: A great number of these books were either free or low cost. My usual price range is 99p to £5. This list has also built up over ten or so years, so I'm not spending thousands annually on books!  Around sixty to eighty of these titles came from Storybundles, so were not bought individually but as a group, often with the intention of only reading a handful of the titles.  I have n...

The Decagon House Murders: And Then There Were None, Redone

" If only I could experience that for the first time again ." It's one of the most human emotions in the world, one we feel about everything from Star Wars to seeing the ocean. Some experiences can never be re-lived and some might only be re-experienced with new perspective and older eyes.    But The Decagon House Murders (by Yukito Ayatsuji, translated by Ho-Ling Wong) is that rarest of things - one that allows you to re-experience a classic all over again. It's a Japanese mystery novel, published in 1987 and released for English audiences in 2020. It became a cult classic in Japan, reinvigorating the literary appetite for puzzle-based mysteries.   The book revolves around members of a mystery book club at a Japanese university. They are fans of the 'golden age of detective novels', discussing the books, writing stories of their own, and going on trips together. Luckily for Western readers, and for readers who struggle with large casts, they only refer to e...

My Month of Rescued Short Stories

When revealing my terrifying list of my TBR Books , it was with the caveat that it did not include a few old bags of books that are kept in my bedroom in my mother's house.  Technically I own these books, and bought them with an intent to read them, but honestly, I doubted there was much there to hold my interest in 2024. Many of them were 50p classics picked up in charity shops ten-to-fifteen years ago, and I'd much rather grab a digital copy than poke through a yellowed, cobweb-covered reminder of my years of trying to better myself in poverty. But I was home for Christmas and I thought I'd take an opportunity to go through and see if there was anything worth rescuing. Alongside the brick-sized Dickens and Tolstoy paperbacks, I discovered there were three short story collections just sitting there, waiting to be read.  Since my recent Short Story Advent really opened me up to a new way of consuming short stories, this seemed an ideal opportunity to find something meanin...