The Natural Way of Things

Charlotte Wood

The Natural Way of Things
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Allen & Unwin
Country
Australia
Published
1 October 2019
Pages
320
ISBN
9781760877071

The Natural Way of Things

Charlotte Wood

Winner, 2016 Stella Prize

**Co-winner, 2016 Prime Minister’s Award

Winner, Fiction Book of the Year and Book of the Year 2016 Indie Awards**
The Natural Way of Things is a gripping, starkly imaginative exploration of contemporary misogyny and corporate control, and of what it means to hunt and be hunted. Most of all, it is the story of two friends, their sisterly love and courage.

With extraordinary echoes of The Handmaid’s Tale and Lord of the Flies, The Natural Way of Things is a compulsively readable, scarifying and deeply moving contemporary novel. It confirms Charlotte Wood’s position as one of our most thoughtful, provocative and fearless truth-tellers, as she unflinchingly reveals us and our world to ourselves.

‘With a fearless clarity, Wood’s elegantly spare and brutal prose dissects humanity, hatreds, our ambivalent capacities for friendship and betrayal, and the powerful appearance–always–of moments of grace and great beauty … It will not leave you easily; it took my breath away.’–Ashley Hay, author of A Hundred Small Lessons

Shortlisted, 2016 Miles Franklin Literary Award
Shortlisted, 2016 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards
Shortlisted, 2016 Barbara Jefferis Award
Shortlisted, 2016 Queensland Literary Award for Fiction
Shortlisted, 2016 Voss Literary Prize

Review

I read The Natural Way of Things in one sitting several weeks ago and it kicked up a lot of dust that is only now settling. It has been compared to The Handmaid’s Tale, rightly so, and returning to that novel after twenty years has gone some way in helping me to understand what I loved about Charlotte Wood’s contemporary, Australian version.

When writers create terrifying, unjust situations for their characters – like the forced imprisonment of a group of women in a desert prison compound, as occurs in The Natural Way of Things – they explain the wider situation to the reader with world-building. Seeing the bigger picture satisfies our curiosity and gives us context; perhaps it also distances us from the situation, if only falsely. But The Natural Way of Things doesn’t do this as such. Rather than setting a new context, Wood presents to us a microcosm; a crude, intelligently formed physical manifestation of the way we torture and humiliate women for being what used to be quaintly called ‘fallen’.

This approach allows Wood to look more intensely (than, say, Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale) at the transformation of several women under these brutal circumstances. We also witness the transformation of the two men and one woman who are ostensibly in charge of the compound, although it becomes clear that something bigger and more mysterious is really in charge. The reader’s knowledge is invited into the landscape of the novel: quickly we recognise what we’re seeing – heads shaved, shapeless uniforms, violence and humiliation. The women are chained to each other and live in small, hot cells (old shearers’ quarters). While some parts of the prison seem makeshift, the electric fence surrounding them is hi-tech and quietly terrifying. We almost know what this is, on a visceral level as well as intellectually, but we don’t yet understand why.

Glimpses of the past life of the two brilliantly drawn women we form an allegiance with – Verla and Yolanda – give us the context we need. The relationship that develops between them is powerful and unsentimental, the group dynamics horribly plausible. What justice we eventually get is twisted and difficult to celebrate, but by then any sense of evil punished is impossible to resist.

I was gripped by the full-bodied, precise prose. Wood deftly shows us how we are savage, revolting, tender, desperate, and especially how we survive. For me it is the transformation of Yolanda that is the most affecting and thrilling. The ending of the novel is its own triumph.


Emily Gale is a freelance reviewer.

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