Little, Brown and Company, 368 pp.
Published January 16, 2018
Five women. One question. What is a woman for?
In this ferociously imaginative novel, abortion is once again illegal in America, in-vitro fertilization is banned, and the Personhood Amendment grants rights of life, liberty, and property to every embryo. In a small Oregon fishing town, five very different women navigate these new barriers alongside age-old questions surrounding motherhood, identity, and freedom.
Ro, a single high-school teacher, is trying to have a baby on her own, while also writing a biography of Eivør, a little-known 19th-century female polar explorer. Susan is a frustrated mother of two, trapped in a crumbling marriage. Mattie is the adopted daughter of doting parents and one of Ro's best students, who finds herself pregnant with nowhere to turn. And Gin is the gifted, forest-dwelling homeopath, or "mender," who brings all their fates together when she's arrested and put on trial in a frenzied modern-day witch hunt.
Red Clocks is the eeriest sort of dystopian fiction. Its world resembles ours perfectly save for one or two minor alterations—in this case, legislation criminalizing abortion, banning the 'unnatural' procedure of IVF, and restricting adoption to couples only—that shape the characters' actions. The notion chills: just one law and the entire landscape of a nation changes overnight. As a political message, Red Clocks reminds readers of how tenuous their personal liberty is and how dangerous complacency becomes when practiced on a broad scale. More than that, it points out that even activism can fail, as one character muses on the protests and rallies she attended only to see the law passed anyway.
The message rarely obscures the story it services, though. Each of the five women's unique voices intermingle with the uniting question: how is my worth tied to my sex? Their diversity of circumstances gives Red Clocks a much wider appeal than a single narrator could have. The cautionary tale of Mattie, a teenager whose power of choice dwindles each day of her pregnancy, balances against married mother of two Susan, deeply unhappy with the life and relationships lauded by the Personhood Amendment. Gin, the mender, binds them all together, if not through shared relationships then by virtue of the mythology of her life that percolates through the town in which they live.
Zumas' prose makes the straightforward plot soar. A touch of magical realism infuses the mender's chapters, tinged with a dark secret to her concoctions. The vaguely written recollections of Eivør's unconventional life dovetail with modern upheavals, a subtle demonstration of the true progress made over the intervening two hundred years. Her lyricism and emotional honesty make the frightening immediacy of these changes almost pleasant to consume and it's here that I believe the sincerest comparison to Atwood can be made.
The narrative dramatics do stretch credulity at times. I struggled to believe that Canada would so actively assist with enforcing their neighbor's new laws or that grown men and women could seriously entertain the thought that Gin 'summoned' a plague of seaweed to choke the town's fishing industry. As subtly as Zumas drew this near-future world, even small inconsistencies like these occasionally carried me outside the book's spell.
Whatever minor gymnastics had to take place to make room for this new way of life, however, did not extend to the characters. Through a diverse span of ages, histories, and outlooks on reproductive rights and the consequences exercising them, each woman appears on the page already fully formed. Their responses to motherhood, pregnancy, and its possible termination all reflect the complexity of the issues at hand. Normally assured in my own beliefs about personal freedoms, several times I found myself confronted with just how murky the human element can make any ongoing moral debate.
While Red Clocks didn't surpass The Handmaid's Tale as a favorite feminist dystopia for me, it's certainly earned a place beside it on the shelf. Zumas' prose and delicately conceived characters mesmerize as you navigate this cautionary exploration of an America even closer to us than than the Gilead of thirty years ago.
RATING:
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