Novel of the week Cal Revely-Calder
It’s no surprise that dystopias, given the state of the world, are in literary vogue. They warn of places that began like ours, but went grievously – and plausibly – wrong. And fables are a wonderfully insidious variant: they admonish, but they also enchant. Sophie Mackintosh’s debut novel, The Water Cure, was a contemporary fable, and – after Anna Burns’s Milkman – the standout novel of 2018. Set on an (unnamed) island, inhabited by a female quartet, it showed how the incursion of male violence, even on a fantasy shore, could be all too familiarly malign.
Blue Ticket, her second novel, is woven of similar concerns. The narrator is a young woman named Calla, who rebels against the system governing girls in her (unnamed) society. It allots them a ticket upon their first period. White: they’re permitted children; blue: they’re forbidden by law. “That’s how your life becomes a set thing,” she thinks. “Some called it a sacrifice, others a mercy.” But Calla is haunted by strange desires: seeing pushchairs in the street, having dreams of loss and pain. Illegally, she forsakes contraception, and has sex with an ignorant man. Once she’s pregnant, she must go on the run. In this surveillance state, neither doctors nor “emissaries”, the secret police, are kind to women who disobey.
Blue Ticket has two modes, two paces. There’s reverie, in the elegant passages where Calla ruminates on motherhood. And there’s the thrill of the chase, as she flees the city, heading north and becoming an unlikely survivalist. Both are expertly fashioned, and Mackintosh’s prose is relentlessly fine; but in being aware of an alternate gear, you’re always expecting it to change. For all the deftness of its style, Blue Ticket is playing two games at once, and it’s a fraction less seamless or eerie than The Water Cure was. Still, it’s unsettling, as it should be, and besides, the bar was set so high. Even for a writer as skilled as Mackintosh, enchantment is a difficult thing.