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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
If buying this book beware that it is exactly the same as "THe Carhullan Army" by the same author. Odd to have both in print at the same time.
But definately worth a read.
I think I prefer the previos title. Unless of course there is going to be a sequel.
But definately worth a read.
I think I prefer the previos title. Unless of course there is going to be a sequel.
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall tells the story of a woman that we only know by the nickname 'Sister' as she leaves her life in a tenement in England to join a women's society in the north. While in the rest of the country global warming, war and an all-powerful party-state known as the Authority have made life comparable to something Orwell might have imagined, in the hills she finds an eco-friendly but not entirely peaceful community. At once riddled with romance and touching instances of friendship, the novel is ruled by similar ideas to those in Margaret Atwood's 'Handmaiden's Tale', namely female sexuality, the freedom to reproduce or the lack of it. Where the book fails, in my opinion as a non-Brit and thus a reader unfamiliar with the scenery in question, is in its too close description of the farm's surroundings and the wildlife in which this new society is born. That said, this reader acknowledges that perhaps the importance of describing in great detail the wild, unspoiled lands is symbolic way of examining the women who inhabit the same space.
Format:Paperback
In an undefined time Britain as we know it has collapsed and the country in under the control of the Authority. The unnamed narrator just called Sister leaves her home and her failed marriage and travels to Carhullan, an all-female agricultural community in Cumbria, as an act of resistance. But once there she is increasingly drawn to the charismatic Jackie, the leader, who has had 10 years in an elite Army unit and the peaceful community is forced to choose between passivity and an active aggression more usually gendered masculine.
This is an intelligent and thoughtful book that sets up deliberate comparisons with other dystopian fiction (1984, The Handmaid's Tale) and which appears, at first, to be an ecological, political and feminist polemic. Hall seems to deliberately evoke the male myth of the Amazons, a female separatist community that uses men for sex and sends away their male children, but uses it to highlight the tensions amongst the women. The idea of women as a peaceful alternative to male-ordered society is also severely undercut by the figure of Jackie and the SAS-inspired training she imposes on her recruits.
At heart this book explores the extent to which gender is an essential characteristic vs. the idea of it being something which is socially-constructed and thus controllable and self-fashioning. Are women just men who can have babies? To what extent is `femininity' something which is conditioned into us and so something which can also be thrown off? And is that act of throwing off one of liberation or of servitude to just another form of imprisonment?
The book allows readers to make up their own mind, but the final image, for me, of Sister: nameless, martyred deliberately so that Jackie's story can be told, interrogated and about to be executed, is one of suicide, however she constructs it in her own head. But the very fact that other readers might see things differently is a tribute to Hall's subtle skills of both writing and thought.
This is an intelligent and thoughtful book that sets up deliberate comparisons with other dystopian fiction (1984, The Handmaid's Tale) and which appears, at first, to be an ecological, political and feminist polemic. Hall seems to deliberately evoke the male myth of the Amazons, a female separatist community that uses men for sex and sends away their male children, but uses it to highlight the tensions amongst the women. The idea of women as a peaceful alternative to male-ordered society is also severely undercut by the figure of Jackie and the SAS-inspired training she imposes on her recruits.
At heart this book explores the extent to which gender is an essential characteristic vs. the idea of it being something which is socially-constructed and thus controllable and self-fashioning. Are women just men who can have babies? To what extent is `femininity' something which is conditioned into us and so something which can also be thrown off? And is that act of throwing off one of liberation or of servitude to just another form of imprisonment?
The book allows readers to make up their own mind, but the final image, for me, of Sister: nameless, martyred deliberately so that Jackie's story can be told, interrogated and about to be executed, is one of suicide, however she constructs it in her own head. But the very fact that other readers might see things differently is a tribute to Hall's subtle skills of both writing and thought.
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