Culture | Australian fiction

The way of the world

A prize-winning Australian novel

The Natural Way of Things. By Charlotte Wood. Europa; 208 pages; $17. Allen & Unwin; £12.99.

AT THE start of this unsettling novel by Charlotte Wood, who was born in New South Wales in 1965, two Australian women awake drugged and imprisoned, wearing “bizarre olden-day costume”. Soon the full horror of Ms Wood’s contemporary fable becomes clear. Yolanda and Verla, along with eight others, have been made to disappear, victims of a conspiracy to silence women who inconvenience powerful men.

A haunting parable of contemporary misogyny, “The Natural Way of Things”, which earlier this year won the Stella prize for fiction by Australian women, is “The Handmaid’s Tale” for our age of sensational media and reality television. Like Margaret Atwood’s dark vision of religious dictatorship, it is a preview of what could happen to women who rock the boat, resisting predation or asserting their own sexual freedom.

This is a tale of captivity, with all its tedium and desperation. Yet the remote desert prison, surrounded by dark bush and a vast bowl of sky, provides a kind of solace. Trapped alongside the minions of the faceless corporation that has spirited them away, the women and their captors struggle to survive. The “natural way of things” refers not just to male domination but to deeper, more sustaining bonds between humans and nature.

Like the surreal prison itself, Ms Wood’s writing is direct and spare, yet capable of bursting with unexpected beauty. Kookaburras “dazzled the darkness with their horrible noise”; Verla is “mesmerised by pairs of seed pods nestled at the base of a grass tree: hot orange, bevelled, testicular”. A rabbit trap is “a drooping bouquet of rusted steel”. Yolanda, scarred by gang rape, becomes a hunter, driven ever deeper into her animal self; Verla, whose “crime” was sleeping with a cabinet minister, realises that even her education and privilege will not protect her. Their groping towards mutual understanding is the novel’s heart: “Yolanda and Verla hold themselves apart, for survival. This is their bond.”

The most chilling aspect of Ms Wood’s premise is its plausibility. Nowadays, women who denounce sexism are routinely attacked on social media; the novel’s more savage forms of punishment logically extend the ways in which they can be bullied and silenced. The very absence of the corporate captors makes the horror worse. No one will come; no one cares. The sly and devastating ending makes the point: Ladies, you have been warned.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "The way of the world"

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