The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood

What a truly awful book. It’s a combination of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Cormack McCarthy’s The Road, but without the brilliance. It’s a sort of dystopian novel, though the setting is contemporary, about women who have been shamed by the media as sluts – women who have slept with the whole football team, who’ve been caught having affairs with politicians and so forth. Other people in their lives – friends, brothers, other women – somehow have the power to have them disappeared by a group called Hardings. There are shades of the forced lobotomies of the early 20th century, of the corporate run detention centres of the present, of the systematic abuses of children in care. But it’s such a miserable, depressing, gloomy read. Some women cave in, other women find strength, lots of women go mad. I can see this writer is a fire and brimstone feminist, and good on her for that, but the book is just so bloody depressing. And again, so mundanely written. And it just goes on and on. Emma, who lent it to me, told me not to bother returning it.