
She hears her own thick voice deep inside her ears when she says, 'I need to know where I am.' The man stands there, tall and narrow, hand still on the doorknob, surprised. He says, almost in sympathy, 'Oh, sweetie. You need to know what you are.'
Two women awaken from a drugged sleep to find themselves imprisoned in a broken-down property in the middle of nowhere. Strangers to each other, they have no idea where they are or how they came to be there with eight other girls, forced to wear strange uniforms, their heads shaved, guarded by two inept yet vicious armed jailers and a 'nurse'. The girls all have something in common, but what is it? What crime has brought them here from the city? Who is the mysterious security company responsible for this desolate place with its brutal rules, its total isolation from the contemporary world? Doing hard labour under a sweltering sun, the prisoners soon learn what links in each girl's past is a sexual scandal with a powerful man. They pray for rescue — but when the food starts running out it becomes clear that the jailers have also become the jailed. The girls can only rescue themselves.
The Natural Way of Things, Charlotte Wood
Read for f2f bookclub discussion, which unfortunately we then missed due to illness. One of those books that would just about be guaranteed to split a readership dramatically, there was much that was intriguing and much that irritated the life out of me about this book.
The ending seemed very odd, with a strangely passive outcome and a heap of open threads which normally wouldn't be an issue, but for some reason they grated here - possibly because everything seemed to be heading for some sort of resolution that ultimately didn't arrive.
Having said that it felt very much like the woman's version of Lord of the Flies, and is obviously provocative, whilst also exploring the relationship between captive and captor, and the power balance shifts and movements as the group all found themselves in extenuating circumstances.
Definitely a worthwhile book for a group discussion like the one we were very keen to join in, and very disappointed to miss.