From the autumn 2020 edition of New Humanist.
Blue Ticket (Hamish Hamilton) by Sophie Mackintosh
Olive (HarperCollins) by Emma Gannon
Once, not so very long ago, it seemed that much of literature was preoccupied by a single central question: what did it mean to be a man? Was it manly deeds, a lion’s heart? Was man primarily a political animal, or was he engaged in a more primal struggle against nature?
In more recent decades, I sense, the focus has shifted onto women. As the Belgian philosopher Luce Irigaray declared in 1984, “sexual difference is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age” – and it has only become more pressing and less clear in the years since, as we continue to wrestle at the practical and political level with a raft of complex questions. In recent years, writers such as Rebecca Solnit, Roxane Gay and Sheila Heti have produced varied works scrutinising how women move through the world. But some of the most ambitious and challenging examinations of womanhood are taking place in the realm of speculative fiction.
Sophie Mackintosh’s dream-like, ominous novel Blue Ticket is a book in this tradition, set in a world that looks very similar to our own – except that when a girl hits puberty, she is removed from school and entered into a lottery that determines whether she will have children or be banned from doing so. A white ticket means that you must have a child, blue that you cannot. Our protagonist Calla pulls a blue ticket. Then, she is handed a bottle of water, a sandwich and a compass, and sent alone into the world.
From the opening page, Mackintosh zeroes in on a choice that currently represents the crossroads at the heart of my own life, whether I want it to or not. Children or no children, pregnancy or no pregnancy. As a biological woman in my mid-30s, I find myself weighing up this decision every day. I have, I assume, the capacity. But do I have the inclination? The more I think about it, the deeper the question goes: is motherhood an essential aspect of womanhood? Will child-bearing – or not – become the defining characteristic of my life?
Blue Ticket pursues this mode of thinking to its extremes. There is no having it all in the world that Mackintosh constructs. Women are mothers or they are not, and those who blur the boundary become, quite literally, outlaws. This is the fate that Calla meets in later life, when she finds herself driven to impregnate herself at any cost.
I happened to read Mackintosh’s book in tandem with Emma Gannon’s Olive, a lively novel aimed at a more commercial market, in which a magazine writer worries she is growing apart from her friends as they pursue marriage and motherhood. Olive is smart, funny and eminently readable. By grounding a likeable protagonist in relatable life circumstances, it tells a moving personal story, charting one woman’s choice to live child-free and offering the cheering prospect that – whatever one decides – we might end up happy and fulfilled.
In a strange way, however, it is Mackintosh’s Calla – a blank canvas of a character, adrift in a frightening and unfriendly environment – who has found her way into my thoughts, permeating my everyday life. The stripped-back characters and uncanny world depicted in Blue Ticket offered a completely different angle on a familiar subject.
Blue Ticket reads like an allegory, but the moral we are to take from it is not clear. Unlike Olive, Calla is expected to be child-free and happy, but finds she cannot be. Later, hiding out with other fugitive women, she meets her equal and opposite: a white ticket woman who cannot bear the idea of pregnancy. Cosseted since adolescence, this woman has fled the soft furnishings and picket fences of white ticket life in search of freedom, abandon and independence. Their meeting – and uneasy truce in the face of a belligerent society that disapproves equally of both of them – takes on mythic proportions.
Speculative fiction allows us to examine deep questions without the baggage that we all bring, as readers, to more realist offerings. We do not condemn Calla for her decisions in the way we might – I might – subject Gannon’s workaholic, loveable Olive to judgement.
The influence of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) can be felt in Blue Ticket, as it can in many novels often lumped together under the heading “feminist dystopia”. Atwood’s magnum opus offers a dystopian vision of a theocratic regime taking ownership of women’s bodies, forcing a select group into motherhood for the greater good.
Adapted into an award-winning TV show, it can be seen as an antecedent for Leni Zumas’ Red Clocks (2018), set in an America where abortion has been banned; Christina Dalcher’s Vox, also published in 2018, in which women are permitted to speak only 100 words a day; and Naomi Alderman’s The Power (2016), in which women realise they can generate electrical currents, turning the tables on the men who subjugated them by force.
Like parables, these stories can sometimes slip into didacticism. Thought experiments, with clean lines and clearly explained premises, can offer the illusion of simple conclusions. But this does not have to be the case.
Hailed as a feminist trailblazer, the late Ursula K. Le Guin set a high bar with her body of work, using science fiction as an arena for the subtle dissection of sex and gender. Most famously, Left Hand of Darkness (1969) posed the question “how might a genderless society function?” The people of Gethen are androgynous neuters except during their monthly heat, when they temporarily grow male or female sexual organs and experience desire. Yet this is no utopia. We see Gethen through the eyes of an emissary for an interplanetary trade coalition, who struggles to relate to a society with its own issues and tensions.
Ambiguity is also a strength of Mackintosh’s work. As with her previous novel, The Water Cure, there are no easy takeaways. Mackintosh believes in “letting go of certainty,” as she has written elsewhere. “I believe a novel is only one side of a story that can refract in infinite ways.” Blue Ticket is challenging for this reason. At points while reading it, I felt the dizzying vertigo of moral uncertainty. Since I finished, I often think about Calla and her lottery, and wonder if it might be nice to be told what to do. I yearn for the simplicity of a white ticket. The clarity of a blue. But Mackintosh’s book, like all good speculative fiction, reminds us of a truth in the real world. Choice, onerous or not, is a luxury. I hope that this one remains mine to make.
