Review
The first well-crafted and surreal novel from a talented new writer. (Literary Review )
An odd novel, and very compelling. (Head and Hands )
An odd novel, and very compelling. (Head and Hands )
Review
A gripping story, a pithy book. (Katy Campbell City Limits )
Product Description
Tucked up on the ward and secure in the latest technology, Zelda is about to give birth to her baby. But things don’t go to plan, and as her labour progresses and the drugs take over, Zelda enters a surreal world. Here, past and present become confused and blend with fairytale and myth. Old secrets surface and finally give birth to disturbing revelations in the present.
Originally published in the eighties, The Birth Machine was seized on by readers as giving voice to a female experience absent from fiction until then and quickly became a classic text. Out of print for some years, The Birth Machine is now reissued in a revised version. It is still relevant today to modern Obstetrics and Medicine, however it is more than that: it is also a gripping story of buried secrets and a long-ago murder, and of present-day betrayals. Above all, it is a powerful novel about the ways we can wield control through logic and language, and about the battle over who owns the right to knowledge and to tell the stories of who we are. The book was dramatised for Radio 4 and starred Barbara Marten as Zelda.
Originally published in the eighties, The Birth Machine was seized on by readers as giving voice to a female experience absent from fiction until then and quickly became a classic text. Out of print for some years, The Birth Machine is now reissued in a revised version. It is still relevant today to modern Obstetrics and Medicine, however it is more than that: it is also a gripping story of buried secrets and a long-ago murder, and of present-day betrayals. Above all, it is a powerful novel about the ways we can wield control through logic and language, and about the battle over who owns the right to knowledge and to tell the stories of who we are. The book was dramatised for Radio 4 and starred Barbara Marten as Zelda.
About the Author
Elizabeth Baines was born in South Wales and lives in Manchester. She has been a teacher and is an occasional actor as well as the prize-winning author of plays for radio and stage, and of two novels, The Birth Machine and Body Cuts. Her award-winning short stories have been published widely in magazines and anthologies. Her first story collection, Balancing on the Edge of the World, was published by Salt in 2007. A novel, Too Many Magpies, will come from Salt in November 2009.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Author’s Note
In spite of the ‘death of the author’, no novel gets written without a novelist’s strong intention, and my intention when I wrote The Birth Machine in 1982 was to tell a story exploring the hubris of much contemporary ‘scientific’ thinking. In particular, I was interested in the contemporary tendency to overlook, or even deny, the factor of uncertainty. In the background were the pronouncements of politicians and ‘scientists’ with vested interests that there was no proof of any link between the nuclear power station at Sellafield and the cancer clusters nearby – overlooking the point that there was no proof of no link, either – and their conclusion that therefore we could be confident that there was no danger, rather than the more logical one that we could not make any pronouncements about the level or likelihood of danger, and therefore ought to be careful, in case (a lack of logic applied now to BSE); the arrogance of the nuclear industry in general and of the space race (the Chernobyl and Challenger disasters waiting to happen); travesties like Thalidomide already acknowledged in our socio-pharmacological history.
Obstetrics was especially apt as a context for my theme: it is in the moments of birth that the line between burgeoning life and proximate death is at its fuzziest, and, in the contemporary high-tech set-up, so-called scientific objectivity and personal subjectivity most strikingly in conflict.
The original version of The Birth Machine, as it appears in this edition, is specifically structured to establish, in the opening chapters, the last of these concerns – the problematic conflict between scientific ‘objectivity’ and personal subjectivity. Chapter One begins with the famous Professor, the supposed carrier of scientific objectivity, addressing a conference. The setting is deliberately international, far removed in geography and glamour from the hospital bed to which we will eventually be taken. We witness the effect of the Professor’s charisma, and thus his influence; we follow briefly his hectic dash back across the Atlantic, his lordly sweep through his secretary’s office and on to the ward where the students await him. The woman on the bed is seen by us through the eyes of the students, as an object in his virtuoso demonstration. While the whole is undercut by satire, and a questioning of the authority of the Professor thus prompted, the only world we are in any way invited to share is that of the medical profession, and the very mode of satire implicates the reader in a stance of superiority and detachment.
At the end of Chapter One a new viewpoint and tone are signalled, and the opening of Chapter Two takes us into a contrasting world: the childhood memories of Zelda, the woman lying on the bed – triggered, ironically, by the way the nurses treat her like a child.
But this is yet another displacement. It is not until Chapter Four that we are presented with the cold reality of Zelda’s subjective experience of the initial procedures of obstetric induction.
This structure is intended to wean the reader (and in particular the unwilling or squeamish reader) gradually from the safety of ‘objectivity’, via a growing familiarity with Zelda through her memories, to the shock of her subjectivity – though even then her experience is presented as flashback, in third-person past tense: Zelda herself, leave alone the reader, can only contemplate it at a distance. There is a further, more important, intention: to demonstrate, via these perspective shifts, the shocking temptations for all of us in the glamour of detachment.
Katy Campbell, reviewing the first edition in City Limits, declared the book ‘especially recommended for anyone involved in the Obstetrics industry.’ Since Obstetrics was (and still is) dominated by men, it is ironic, therefore, that the publisher prepared in 1983 to take on such a novel was publishing for women. For The Women’s Press edition the chapter confronting us with Zelda’s subjective experience (here appearing as Chapter Four) was moved to the beginning. Since readers were not expected to be male, the suasive tactics of my earlier structure were judged unnecessary, and a beginning with which women readers could identify was thought more desirable. This change necessitated, structurally, another change: from past to present tense within the chapter, increasing further its immediacy.
In the end it’s not for me, as the writer, to say which version is better, or whether either version fulfils completely the authorial/editorial intention behind its creation, and whether indeed it matters if it doesn’t – all this has to be up to readers. I do believe, however, that they are different books, with different meanings. What we read first in any piece of work filters what we read next (however differently each maverick reader reads), and I believe that the placing of the ‘subjective’ and non-satiric chapter at the start lent the whole a realist and ‘confessional’ slant, and it was this which prompted readings of the novel as a passionate plea for natural childbirth, rather than as the plea for logic I intend it to be.
ELIZABETH BAINES
In spite of the ‘death of the author’, no novel gets written without a novelist’s strong intention, and my intention when I wrote The Birth Machine in 1982 was to tell a story exploring the hubris of much contemporary ‘scientific’ thinking. In particular, I was interested in the contemporary tendency to overlook, or even deny, the factor of uncertainty. In the background were the pronouncements of politicians and ‘scientists’ with vested interests that there was no proof of any link between the nuclear power station at Sellafield and the cancer clusters nearby – overlooking the point that there was no proof of no link, either – and their conclusion that therefore we could be confident that there was no danger, rather than the more logical one that we could not make any pronouncements about the level or likelihood of danger, and therefore ought to be careful, in case (a lack of logic applied now to BSE); the arrogance of the nuclear industry in general and of the space race (the Chernobyl and Challenger disasters waiting to happen); travesties like Thalidomide already acknowledged in our socio-pharmacological history.
Obstetrics was especially apt as a context for my theme: it is in the moments of birth that the line between burgeoning life and proximate death is at its fuzziest, and, in the contemporary high-tech set-up, so-called scientific objectivity and personal subjectivity most strikingly in conflict.
The original version of The Birth Machine, as it appears in this edition, is specifically structured to establish, in the opening chapters, the last of these concerns – the problematic conflict between scientific ‘objectivity’ and personal subjectivity. Chapter One begins with the famous Professor, the supposed carrier of scientific objectivity, addressing a conference. The setting is deliberately international, far removed in geography and glamour from the hospital bed to which we will eventually be taken. We witness the effect of the Professor’s charisma, and thus his influence; we follow briefly his hectic dash back across the Atlantic, his lordly sweep through his secretary’s office and on to the ward where the students await him. The woman on the bed is seen by us through the eyes of the students, as an object in his virtuoso demonstration. While the whole is undercut by satire, and a questioning of the authority of the Professor thus prompted, the only world we are in any way invited to share is that of the medical profession, and the very mode of satire implicates the reader in a stance of superiority and detachment.
At the end of Chapter One a new viewpoint and tone are signalled, and the opening of Chapter Two takes us into a contrasting world: the childhood memories of Zelda, the woman lying on the bed – triggered, ironically, by the way the nurses treat her like a child.
But this is yet another displacement. It is not until Chapter Four that we are presented with the cold reality of Zelda’s subjective experience of the initial procedures of obstetric induction.
This structure is intended to wean the reader (and in particular the unwilling or squeamish reader) gradually from the safety of ‘objectivity’, via a growing familiarity with Zelda through her memories, to the shock of her subjectivity – though even then her experience is presented as flashback, in third-person past tense: Zelda herself, leave alone the reader, can only contemplate it at a distance. There is a further, more important, intention: to demonstrate, via these perspective shifts, the shocking temptations for all of us in the glamour of detachment.
Katy Campbell, reviewing the first edition in City Limits, declared the book ‘especially recommended for anyone involved in the Obstetrics industry.’ Since Obstetrics was (and still is) dominated by men, it is ironic, therefore, that the publisher prepared in 1983 to take on such a novel was publishing for women. For The Women’s Press edition the chapter confronting us with Zelda’s subjective experience (here appearing as Chapter Four) was moved to the beginning. Since readers were not expected to be male, the suasive tactics of my earlier structure were judged unnecessary, and a beginning with which women readers could identify was thought more desirable. This change necessitated, structurally, another change: from past to present tense within the chapter, increasing further its immediacy.
In the end it’s not for me, as the writer, to say which version is better, or whether either version fulfils completely the authorial/editorial intention behind its creation, and whether indeed it matters if it doesn’t – all this has to be up to readers. I do believe, however, that they are different books, with different meanings. What we read first in any piece of work filters what we read next (however differently each maverick reader reads), and I believe that the placing of the ‘subjective’ and non-satiric chapter at the start lent the whole a realist and ‘confessional’ slant, and it was this which prompted readings of the novel as a passionate plea for natural childbirth, rather than as the plea for logic I intend it to be.
ELIZABETH BAINES
