They lured abduction and abandonment to themselves, they marshalled themselves into this prison where they had made their beds, and now, once more, were lying in them. 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 centre, as if womanhood itself were the cause of these things? As if the girls somehow, through the natural way of things, did it to themselves.
What would people in their old lives be saying about the girls? Would they be called missing? Would some documentary program on the ABC that nobody watched, or one of those thin newspapers nobody read, somehow connect their cases, find the thread to make them a story? The Lost Girls, they would be called. Where are they? What have they done to be imprisoned in this manner? What can they do to escape?
They are guarded by two men in boiler suits. They find themselves in an unfamiliar room and they are both wearing “stupid Amish clothes”. When the story opens, we meet two women, Yolanda and Verla, who have awoken after a drugged sleep. Here, women are punished for involvement in sexual “crimes” and misdemeanours in which they have been publicly shamed and their male perpetrators have got away scot-free.
In a narrative that is both gripping and illuminating, Wood creates a dystopian world that doesn’t actually look much different to the current one. Like the beautiful image on the cover in which gorgeous flora and fauna hide the objects of captivity - chains, locks, a knife and barbed wire - Charlotte Wood‘s The Natural Way of Things reveals the darker elements of society which are often obscured by our shallow obsessions with, for instance, sex, glamour and celebrity.
Fiction – paperback Allen & Unwin 315 pages 2015.
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