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.
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