Mother and son go on the run

After land

Lauren Beukes

Mulholland

Is dystopian fiction timely or just too much these days?

Your response probably depends on whether you want the novels you read to mirror, in some refracted way, “how we live now” or whether you yearn to escape into other lives, wider horizons.

I’m unapologetically in the latter category. So the new dystopian suspense novel, Afterland, by Lauren Beukes, did not instantly call to me. Given that it’s being promoted by its publishers as The Children of Men meets The Handmaid’s Tale, Afterland promised a descent into pandemic despair.

But Beukes is such an idiosyncratic writer — one who deftly mashes up suspense, sci-fi, horror, time travel, and, yes, dystopian fiction — that she’s hard to ignore. Like P.D. James and Margaret Atwood, Beukes often spotlights strong female characters plowing their way through harrowing situations.

The present time of Afterland is 2023, three years after the pandemic first struck. (Another unsettling coincidence.) A woman named Cole (short for Nicole) and her adolescent son, Miles (one of the less-than-1 per cent of males worldwide who are immune to the virus), are on the run in a hot-wired car. The pair are speeding away from a deceased tech mogul’s luxurious estate, which has been commandeered by The Department of Men as a locked quarantine facility for surviving men and boys and their female relatives.

As will become clear, mother and son are fleeing not only their government minders, but also Cole’s devious sister, Billie. She turned up at the quarantine centre, ostensibly to be reunited with family, but really to kidnap her young nephew whose, um, emissions will fetch big money on the underground market catering to wealthy women desperate to be impregnated.

What ensues is a suspenseful and intricate on-the-road adventure, told from the alternating perspectives of Cole, Billie and Miles. Or make that “Mila.” For, as soon as Cole and Miles make a pit stop at an abandoned gas station, Cole insists that Miles don a pink T-shirt, skinny jeans and glittery barrettes in his “afro curls” to disguise himself as a girl.

Cole’s goal is to smuggle herself and Miles back to their home in Johannesburg, where they have friends and the situation seems more orderly. Setting out from the West Coast, they must make it to Florida where the possibility of escape awaits.

Overall, Beukes imbues what could have simply been a sensational thriller with psychological depth and sharp detail. Here, for instance, is the opening scene in the bathroom of that derelict gas station:

“Miles is still shaking, his thin arms wrapped around his rib cage, and his eyes keep jerking back to the door. (Cole), too, is expecting the door to burst open. It feels inevitable that they’ll be found and dragged back. She’ll be arrested. Miles will be taken away. In America, they steal kids from their parents. This was true even before all this.”