A misogynistic society with an intense focus on human reproduction? Surely the definitive such dystopian-future novel is The Handmaid’s Tale; it almost seems pointless for anyone else to try. What can another author say that Margaret Atwood has not already said so effectively and pointedly?
You have to give Sophie Mackintosh props for bravery.
In Blue Ticket, her protagonist Calla lives in a world where, at the first onset of puberty, girls are given either a blue or a white ticket that they have to wear in a locket around their necks for the rest of their lives. It defines their futures: blue-ticket girls immediately have a birth-control device inserted, while the smaller subset of white-ticket girls are expected to procreate. Most of the girls are smugly pleased to get their blue ticket. They are then removed from their parents and immediately released into the wild with
a bottle of water, a compass, and a sandwich.
Go, the doctor said to us. To the place of your choice. Walk into it. Anywhere but here.
What?! Why?! The reader is never told the rationale for this brutal initiation into adolescence, and it’s hard to imagine one. On their way to the city, most of these barely pubescent girls, literally having their first period, get raped and abused, and the only way to get any food, shelter, or help is by selling their bodies.
Fast-forward twenty years. Most blue-ticket women, it seems, are relieved to have the choice of procreation taken away from them. Calla is happy with her job in a chemical lab. In her off-hours she enjoys herself drinking, smoking and socializing, sleeping with both men and women, but then she suddenly feels the primal desire for a baby. She removes her own IUD and seduces her sometime lover into protection-free sex. She gets pregnant. (Blue-ticket women, it turns out, never learn anything about pregnancy, labour and delivery, since it is assumed they would never need this knowledge, but somehow she does know all about the purpose of the IUD). She carries the pregnancy for a few months until she starts to show and her regular doctor/therapist finds out. She is offered an abortion, but declines.
Social policy 2, reminiscent of the release of blue-ticket girls into the wild: an ’emissary’ (social police, one gathers) arrives at Calla’s door with a backpack of camping supplies, and she is told she has a ’12 hour head start’ before the state comes after her. Again, why? Surely it would be more convenient for the state to simply pick her up right away? Who benefits from this time-consuming hunting of women who flout the rules, apart from the author?
Anyway, Calla sets off for the ‘border’. She meets women who attack her for her pregnant state, men who assault her when they realize she is a blue-ticket woman, and other pregnant women like herself. Occasionally someone is kind. She bonds with another pregnant woman in flight, Marisol, and a small-scale shelter for such women grows organically.
Much is made of Calla’s overwrought internal monologue about her pregnancy, and for me it got rather tiresome. Even if Calla’s world is unique, pregnancy is not, in real life or fiction. She either sleeps deeply or has trouble sleeping. She eats a lot. She has cravings. She has weird dreams. She is angry at the system that has given her no information about her physical state. She is intrigued by the changes in her body. She measures her expanding stomach.
I understood in a way that felt new that my skin was nothing but a membrane holding in organic matter, that I could spill everywhere like a glass of water if anything wounded me.
We counted the circumference of our bumps. Thirty-seven fingers, I said.
When I combed my hair in the mornings I noted that it was growing back faster than expected.
By week 18 when she first felt the baby move, I was more than ready to move on to labour and delivery, but there were another 20 weeks to go.
Why did Calla decide to flout the laws of her society? It is all attributed to a ‘dark feeling’, a rather simplistic choice of words and one that does not add any depth of understanding, at least for me.
The dark feeling was still there inside me. It was quieter, but I knew that, underneath, the pulse of it was growing as my pregnancy progressed. I understood it now not as an enemy, but a kind of symbiosis. Sometimes I visualized the dark feeling as an animal inside myself.
The book picks up when several women arrive at the shelter, because they add diversity and interest to what has been the Calla Show. One is a white-ticket woman who bitterly resented her (semi-?) forced procreation: she had an abortion, and is now on the run. One blue-ticket woman is ambivalent about her pregnancy, and scared. One thinks the father will come and meet her at the border and they will live together happily in the future. I think it would have been more interesting to expand the interactions between the women, and explore the variety of responses to pregnancy, than to focus so completely on Calla’s own pregnancy.
Sci-fi novels require the creation of an entire world, and their success depends on how believable and complete that world is for the reader. Sad to say, Blue Ticket is not very good by this criterion. The reader is left with so many questions. Has this society decided to allow only 1/10 of the women to have children as a population-control mechanism or a female-control mechanism? If society really doesn’t want them to have children, why the reversible IUD instead of sterilization? Why do the white-ticket women so hate the occasional blue-ticket women who get pregnant? Why does our protagonist have to keep going to the doctor for therapy and checkups? How does this society have enough resources to provide extended weekly therapy for every woman? Why do only fathers push prams around the city — what happened to the white-ticket mothers? And what happens to the men, who seem to avoid most of these Darwinian situations?
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