SPOTLIGHT

Afterland, your new novel, imagines a world where a global pandemic has wiped out half the population, tracking a mother’s desperate attempts to hide her surviving son from lifelong quarantine. Are you a prophet?

I don’t know. I can say, though, that having spent so much time living in a fictional pandemic in my head, it is awful to emerge into the real world and live through one. It’s also a reflection of my experience of motherhood, which a character describes in the book as the “worst game of improv ever”. What balance did you want to strike between radical reimagining and discomforting familiarity?

I wanted to challenge our ideas of what a world of women would look like and flip some of our assumptions around gender roles: that women would be kinder and gentler and that being one of the only surviving biological males would be a sexy time paradise. As it turns out, women are just as capable of weaving a trafficking ring as they are a friendship bracelet. I set the novel in 2023, three years after the pandemic that kills 99% of people with prostates. The power structures are still in place, the social mores are mostly the same, but evolving, and the problems are still the problems, just with a different flavour. The world is still recognisable, but also dramatically changed. Afterland’s pandemic affecting only men and SA’s high rate of gender-based violence make a world run by women sound appealing. But

Afterland is far from a feminist utopia. What ideas around power do you hope people will take from this novel?

This is twofold. The first is looking at gender roles and what we expect of men and women. So 12-year-old Miles is a valuable commodity: to the government, who want to keep him locked up, to the religious zealots, who see him as their chosen one, and also, very uncomfortably, a sex object, a reproductive resource. Women are just as capable of evil, greed and violence as men, especially when they feel they have more to prove.

Secondly, when we talk about fighting power, it’s about the structures, which are brutalist fortresses on the outside and luxury mansions on the inside. You think you want to tear it down but you might end up moving in accidentally because it’s just so nice in there and it works and it is familiar. We’re going to have to do a lot more work to overthrow capitalism and the patriarchy.