“When I was a young woman at the police training academy, I learned two important things.”
You’d think after reading a dystopian horror and having to immediately go into a Wodehouse, I’d have learnt to keep it light for a bit. No, apparently not, here’s another thriller.
At some point in the near future, the laws have changed and women now hold the power. They’ve taken over workplaces, public spaces and the government, and no longer fear crossing a park at night or walking home alone. With the Curfew in place, all men are kept in their homes between the hours of 7pm and 7am thanks to electronic tagging, and violent crime has dropped. Things changed for the better – or so it seemed.
Now a woman’s body has been found at night in a park, murdered, her face battered in. The evidence suggests she knew her attacker, but with only a grainy CCTV film to go on, the police are troubled. Because this feels like the sort of crime a man would commit, but Curfew means every man has the perfect alibi and no man could’ve been out of his house at that time of night without the police already knowing – right?
So, it’s got a strong premise, even if it’s not one that’s believable. I’m willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of good fiction, though, so that’s not really a concern. The issue of violence against women is an important one, and more action should certainly be taken to allow women to be safe, wherever they are. In reading a bit about Cowie’s life and her other books, it’s clear she has an agenda, and I’m not for one second going to say it isn’t a totally reasonable one. I just don’t know if she’s always clear what she’s trying to say. One of the characters, Sarah, has gone full-on misandrist after her divorce, believing with totality that men are evil, a belief she is trying to instil in her daughter. She, however, displays herself several times to be just as capable of violence and rage as the men she hates. I couldn’t work out if Cowie was making a point that women can do the same things they hate men for, or if she felt Sarah was always justified.
Another aspect that doesn’t come up, and is something that probably wouldn’t have occurred to me much ten or even five years ago, is that the book assumes a very heteronormative gender binary. There are no queer characters at all, so while it’s assumed all homosexual men are undergoing the same curfew, it tars all men with the same brush as being inherently violent towards women. There is also absolutely no mention of how transgender people are treated in this society, and what happens when someone wants to change gender. While it’s not perhaps necessary to the story, I’m just really interested in how that would work. I did tweet Cowie to ask, but she hadn’t replied at time of writing.
Perhaps to be expected, as a man, I found the book somewhat uncomfortable. I totally understand the analogy that “not all men” doesn’t work, and it’s more, “if you knew one in ten of these berries was poisonous, but didn’t know which ones, you’d avoid the lot of them”. I fully understand that. But I’m not someone who is violent, threatening or would ever speak to a woman out of turn. Or anyone. I’ll barely talk to stray cats. So I’m pretty sure I’d resent this punishment for something I have been decided I’m capable of doing but never would. But I can see how in this world would become extremists who may not have been before. Like I said above, it’s not a situation that’s likely to happen for real, or at least, not to this extent, so it’s really more of a thought experiment.
Generally, though, I liked it. The writing is your standard thriller fare, but Cowie does a good job of setting up the characters so you are never entirely sure who has been killed or by whom, as there seem to be any number of horrible-to-contemplate combinations available. You’re not smashed over the head with the worldbuilding, although I would be curious to know exactly how long the curfew has been in place (on some occasions characters mention heavy-handedly not hiding that it’s exposition, and there is a subject at school specifically on the history of the curfew) and what happened to politics to allow it. We get to see some of the other changes implemented into a country now aimed more at supporting women (easier divorces, free access to pregnancy tests, girls entitled to sick days from school for their periods, etc), but we never see what that government looks like, given it must now be almost entirely, if not entirely, female.
An interesting concept, and one that will certainly make you think a little bit.