Love in dystopia

In a dystopian future, most women are unable to bear children. The few women who are fertile are managed by the government, whose goal is to ensure the continuation of the species by making sure these women bear children to men of high status. In this society, men hold all the power, and all public institutions and policies cater to them. Women are controlled ‘for their own protection and safety’. A small minority of women are secretly rebellious.

Sound familiar? Indeed, The Handmaid’s Tale looms large over Bina Shah’s Before She Sleeps, and it’s a heavy lift to go up against Margaret Atwood.

There are differences, of course. Atwood’s 1985 novel is set in the United States, now called Gilead, and each fertile woman is assigned to one senior male. Shah’s, published in 2018, is set in the Middle East, in a new Green City, where fertile women are assigned to multiple husbands who all live in a commune, where the father of each child is unknown. Atwood’s dystopia is a Christian theocratic state, while Shah’s is more areligious.

In Shah’s book, a small group of women form the Panah, a necessarily secret club of women who live underground and rent themselves out to lonely old men who simply want company. (Older men are not assigned Wives by the state). There is no sex involved, the women spend the nights cuddling the men until they sleep, and leave the next morning. (Of course, not all men are satisfied by this, and one man drugs his companion and has sex with her.)

The main protagonist and narrator in this novel is Sabine. Her mother, rather than be given to a group of ‘husbands’, committed suicide. When she reaches puberty, Sabine runs away from home and ends up at the Panah, which is managed by Lin. Additional narrators emerge: Lin herself, who has an ongoing affair with the most powerful man in the government; Rupa, who actually wants to escape the Panah and become a regular Wife; Julien, the young medical prodigy who treats Sabine and promptly falls in love with her.

All the narrators, unfortunately, have very similar voices and they are rather flat, and overlaid with a sense of someone or something else controlling the action.

[Julien] Something had truly taken him hostage, making him say and do the unthinkable. Was it her femaleness or the fact that he held her life in his hands?

[Sabine] The room seems to spin around me. He is still talking, oblivious to my state of mind. I shake my head but my face tells the truth.

It seems unfair to compare the two books, but for anyone who has read Atwood, it is unavoidable. The atmosphere and detail in Atwood’s novel is dense, complete and submersive, while I could not stop picking apart plot holes in Shah’s.

This novel brings a non-Western perspective to dystopian fiction, but the underlying assumption of this novel is that women want a longterm monogamous relationship with a man, which rather undercuts its diversity credentials. It is also very sympathetic to the male perspective: the two men who narrate some chapters are Julien, the medical prodigy who will flout any laws to save Sabine, and Reuben, who acts out of love for Lin. The other men are lonely and miserable in their lack of female company, but only one is possessive, demanding, or controlling: the lack of agency for the women comes from the fuzzy ‘government’.

Women are oppressive to each other: Rupa’s mother is grateful that Rupa is a pretty teenager, because the young girl will ‘make better marriages’. Rupa is manipulative: she wants the man who is in love with Sabine. When the Panah is threatened, Lin rather pointlessly yells at the young women ‘Don’t ask any questions’, again denying them agency.

The logic behind the events in the last third of the book becomes increasingly perplexing to the reader.

It is interesting to see South Asian women novelists branching out into new genres, but I’m afraid I can’t recommend this novel.