The Handmaid's Tale meets Lord of the Flies

Opening Charlotte Wood's fifth novel, The Natural Way of Things, is like waking up in hell. Ten women have been drugged, kidnapped, hauled out to the middle of nowhere, and imprisoned in a former sheep station with three hired keepers. Almost immediately the women recognize each other from news coverage and piece together the sole link between them: that each has been involved in some kind of sex scandal, and now each has been carefully "disappeared," although the details of the operation—how it was coordinated and funded, why they were selected, and who planned the whole thing—remain mysterious. Two-thirds of the way through the novel, there is a very short segment in which someone wonders what people would make of their absence: "Would it be said, they 'disappeared,' 'were lost'? Would it be said they were abandoned or taken, the way people said a girl was attacked, a woman was raped, this femaleness always at the center, as if womanhood itself were the cause of these things?" (133). But those questions quickly fade again into the background, and it begins to look like this novel is not exactly a feminist cautionary fable along the lines of The Handmaid's Tale. We never learn anything about the politics or motives of the cabal that so efficiently engineers this mass kidnapping. Certainly there is a running critique of routine Australian sexism; Wood is particularly keen to show us how sexist attitudes have been assimilated by the ten victims, to varying degrees. But the focus of the novel is less political than primordial. This is a kind of prison experiment, the jailers trapped inside with the prisoners, and everyone driven or reduced to something less than fully human. Or perhaps we were never as human as we thought?

The novel is told through the eyes of two of the kidnapped women (or "girls," as they are frequently referred to), Yolanda and Verla, who bond on the first day of their captivity and thereafter provide each other with what marginal support they can as they walk their individual paths toward "going mad, or finding some strange happiness" (138). Although a couple of the women pass their days together in parallel activities, once the routine of work breaks down and they have some freedom over their movements, there is no possibility that they will all join together in female-revenge-fantasy bonding. They parcel out some of the tasks essential to survival, but we never see any of the negotiations or social interactions that lead to the new status quo. This tiny society is not remade before our eyes. It simply clanks into place as variables are introduced or removed. Although the depth of suffering makes us feel as though the story goes on forever, it actually takes place over a relatively short span of time: less than a year, as the chapter titles indicate. Within that nine months or so, something gestates, but it is not a culture. Wood is not interested in conducting an anthropological experiment in community building. Nor do we learn enough about the other eight women to really understand their psychology—they remain oddly trapped in their backstories, seen at the end just as our two point-of-view characters see them originally, though warped to the circumstances of their imprisonment. Wood keeps our focus very tight, within the heads of Yolanda and Verla, as the former seeks to shed her humanity and the latter single-mindedly pursues revenge.

The most important epiphany of the novel is reserved for Verla, who realizes that she was never as special as she thought she was, that her older lover never really saw her and does not really miss her. In the wake of that realization, she must make a decision between Yolanda's path and the one the other survivors will follow. This sense of oneself as an interchangeable piece in a powerful man's narcissistic drama is a very timely...