From Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which is currently undergoing a deserved renaissance thanks to the success of the US TV adaptation, to Naomi Alderman’s justifiably lauded The Power and a significant number of other novels in between, dystopian fiction and gender politics have always proved a powerful combination. And the most enduring stories – like Handmaid – are arguably made more potent because of the simplicity of their concept and their examination of what happens to society when it imposes draconian controls and strips a major part of the population of their identity and freedom to communicate.
Christina Dalcher’s Vox scores highly in both those areas, which makes reading it before news of its brilliance has escaped into the mainstream world quite an experience. And what makes Vox especially chilling is that, like all truly effective dystopian fiction, it’s a disturbingly prescient cautionary tale. Given the current political climate, Dalcher’s vision of a future America in which women are only allowed to speak a hundred words a day doesn’t feel like a huge stretch of the imagination although we’d imagine that, should the time ever come, most of us will be restricted to that word limit regardless of our gender. But hey, we’re here to review books and not discuss politics so we’ll keep those opinions to ourselves…
Dr. Jean McClellan is a neurolinguistic scientist with a young family, including a six-year-old daughter. When the evangelical Pure Movement assumes power and implements with a bat-shit crazy Biblical zeal that only men can rule and women may no longer work, read, write or use more than a hundred words in every twenty-four hours, Jean watches society disintegrate around her and is forced to stand helplessly by as the effect of the Movement on her eldest son becomes steadily more alarming. But Jean has a very particular set of medical skills and when she is called in to continue her research after the president’s brother is taken gravely ill she strikes a deal that will finally give Jean her voice back again. Not only her voice but her daughter’s voice too. And now the government is going to be forced to listen…
Where The Handmaid’s Tale is ostensibly concerned with reproductive rights, Vox is focused on what happens when our language is the primary liberty that’s stolen from us. In that respect it’s almost a Handmaid’s Tale: The Next Generation and, although it’s obviously aimed at a more mainstream thriller audience than Handmaid and Dalcher doesn’t quite have Margaret Atwood’s facility for psychologically attuned prose, Vox still has the emotional and intellectual power to keep you thinking long after you’ve finished reading it. It will also get under your skin and make you extremely angry, regardless of your gender.
VOX / AUTHOR: CHRISTINA DALCHER / PUBLISHER: HQ / RELEASE DATE: AUGUST 23RD
