In courts and legislatures across the US – including in the supreme court – conservative lawmakers are debating just how close to death a woman must be before she can access an emergency abortion when the procedure is otherwise banned. How much suffering must she endure? How much irreparable damage? Which of her organs is dispensable? Which bodily functions are truly essential? What would be enough mortal risk? Enough mortal terror?
There is no viable foetus in these cases, no promise of new life – just a dying woman forced to prove she has a life worth saving. It’s the bureaucracy of it that chills me most, the bloodless, paper-pushing cruelty.
When the real world is so grotesque, it is hard not to be frustrated – bordering on furious – when a novel like Jenny Ackland’s Hurdy Gurdy crosses your desk, and not for the reasons that Ackland might wish. Her new novel is a toothless abortion fable. A sheep in wolf’s clothing.
It is the near future – a time of “infections and inquisitions” – and Australia is a fire-ravaged dustbowl. The sun is dulled by a perpetual haze. The birds are gone. Democracy has all but crumbled and the country’s class inequalities have turned septic. In the capital cities, billionaires slurp down opulent cocktails. In the regions, the internet connection is (still) terminally glitchy, and an itinerant economy has reappeared: a workforce of tinkers, swaggies, travelling salesmen, smugglers, bush-cooks and tincture-peddling quacks. Life is rough out here in the (oddly nostalgic) colonial redux: the men are feral, the women are fearful and every womb is a battlefield. (First Nations folk? Virtuously mentioned, but narratively absent.)
We follow a circus troupe – a ragtag group of women who rumble around the backroads with a caravan of tricks and an ageing tiger. By day, they run a mobile beauty salon that doubles as an abortion clinic. By night, they stage a show with all the big-top trimmings: wire walking, high diving, clowns. (“Clowns are the only ones who can tell truth to power,” Ackland writes, “wrapped as a joke”.)
When the women encounter a particularly heinous man on their travels – a wife-beater or child molester – they offer him a “free shave” and the tiger eats well that night. But rumours are spreading, and someone dangerous is paying attention, a self-appointed warrior for the unborn. A vigilante showdown is brewing: harlequins versus holy fanatics.
This is profoundly tropey territory – the greatest hits of ruination. Station Eleven, The Natural Way of Things, Red Clocks, The Animals in that Country, Praiseworthy, The Power, Wake in Fright, The Road, The Last Circus on Earth: they’re all in here, and then some. (There’s Atwood, of course; there’s always Margaret Atwood.)
Some of Ackland’s references are deeply intentional (Ackland’s grand villain has a handmaid). A great many are unavoidable. It’s a sign of our times that it is becoming harder to invent new ways to torture fictional women, and easier to imagine how the world will end. “Whatever has been done will be done again,” Ackland writes of her dust-burned country. “The world can’t invent any more terrible things because they already exist and always have. It means that nothing is coming to save us, but also that whatever will destroy us is already here.”
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If tales like Hurdy Gurdy are feminist – and that’s a slippery question – then it feels like a masochistic kind of empowerment. I do not need imagined horrors to burnish my rage. Perhaps I did once, before I knew what I know. Perhaps these books are the reason I know what I know.
They certainly keep coming. And coming. All-you-can-eat patriarchies. Weaponised patriarchies. Theocratic patriarchies. Technocratic patriarchies. Post-apocalyptic patriarchies. Copy-cat patriarchies. Books like Hurdy Gurdy are scratching a ferocious cultural itch (or perhaps salving a ferocious cultural wound). I want to honour the impulse, yet question the narrative logic: that we must brutalise women on the page to prove how women are brutalised in the world we live in.
But what bothers me most about Ackland’s third novel is not its derivative horrorshow. Rather, it’s the book’s sly comforts – its moral coddling. And there is so much coddling here, so many bite-sized lessons and allegorical signposts. The hurdy-gurdy of Ackland’s title is a discordant musical instrument that sounds “like having two things in your head and they might be opposite, but you manage to let them both stay”. It’s a blunt force metaphor for the cognitive dissonance of abortion, and it tells us nothing we do not already know in our bones: abortion is ugly, and inevitable.
We meet a harried mother with too many mouths to feed; a pregnant victim of incest; a young girl who will die of sepsis because she took matters into her own hands (the classic high school debate trio). We slide down some ethical slippery slopes, learn the dark price of revenge, encounter a cartoonish zealot or two, and land very neatly in the limp and decorous middle: “It is possible to think a thing is necessary and right,” our narrator explains, “and not want to do it.” Yep. Sure. Great. Thanks. Tell me some more about clowns, while I try to calculate just how many women on this planet aren’t in charge of their bodies.
Am I being unfair to Ackland? I’ve been grappling with this question for weeks now, trying to pin my fury down. Sometimes a piece of art comes along that crystallises all of your cultural misgivings. That is what has happened here. There are many perfectly commendable things to say about Hurdy Gurdy (and its perfectly commendable intentions), and I’m sure that other people will say them. But Ackland’s future fable will change no minds and shake no certainties. Anti-abortion readers won’t go near it. Pro-choice readers will feel mildly righteous. This book has been called “timely”. It is decades too late.
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Hurdy Gurdy by Jenny Ackland is published by Allen and Unwin in Australia, $32.99