Members challenged by this book used American librarian Nancy Pearl’s 'Rule of 50' advice about how far to persist with an unsatisfying book. In summary this is: Commit to the first 50 pages and then decide whether or not to put the rest aside. After the age of 50, subtract your age from 100, and the result gives you the number of pages you should read before abandoning the work without guilt. The older one gets the fewer the required number of pages and the less time wasted. On reaching the age of 100, one is permitted to judge a book by its cover.
Having said that, some members persevered and read the whole novel and while they found much of it grim they agreed that Charlotte Wood’s evocative writing about the natural world was beautiful and formed a stark contrast to the goings-on of the men and women in the plot.
Other members came to the meeting saying they were prepared to continue reading if valid reasons could be given as to why.
Perhaps some background to this book might have been helpful in advance. The author was shocked by an account on ABC Radio of a prison for teenage girls in western NSW (Hay) which was operated by the NSW State Government in the 1960s and the 1970s (finally closing in 1974). It was an offshoot of the Parramatta Girls Home in Sydney for the most "wayward" offenders. In one recorded incident, 10 young girls were drugged and taken to Hay to be installed in the decommissioned men’s prison facilities for being “the 10 worst girls in the state”.
As a result, Wood wrote a feminist novel about an imagined prison in the near future in order to make the reader sit up and think about circumstances in the world we live in today. The book is in the same sort of genre as books like Kafka’s The Trial, Golding’s The Lord of the Flies, and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
In summary, the story is that ten young women awake from a drugged sleep to find out they have been abducted and taken to a derelict sheep station in the Australian outback. The property is in the middle of nowhere, without any form of communications with the outside world, hundreds of square kilometres in size and surrounded by an electric fence six metres high. The establishment imprisons not only the women but their captors - two male guards and a female “nurse” (who is not actually trained in anything).
The women have their personal belongings taken from them, their heads shaved, are installed in narrow cells resembling kennels and are leashed together and forced into meaningless labour. Over time they come to understand that they are there because they have all been involved in sex scandals with powerful men which have caused a public outcry. These scandals are depressingly familiar to the reader, involving a high profile politician, footballers, a cruise ship, a reality TV show, scenes of sexual activity unwittingly shared online, and so on. In some cases males whom the women trust, such as a brother and a boyfriend, seem to have been involved in their capture. But rather than bond together to overthrow their captors, the women largely hang onto their individuality (“I’m not like them”), judge each other, and have futile dreams of being rescued for being falsely imprisoned.
It is gradually revealed that they have been removed from society by a remote and inaccessible authority, the mysterious Hardings International, which upholds the ironic motto: Dignity and Respect in a Safe Environment (the author apparently took this slogan from the website of a real company employed to look after detainees in lockup immigration facilities in Australia). The employees are casuals who readily take to brutality, insults and violence in their roles as prison guards.
Promised bonuses for the male guards for not sexually abusing their captives are gradually forgotten after the power fails on the station (the electric fence mysteriously remains switched on) and everyone realises that Hardings is not coming any time soon to free them.
And so the tension increases and the power structure changes as they all must find a way to survive starvation. One woman eventually agrees to become a guard’s lover on the proviso that the others give her what little they have and make her a weird doll to accompany her wherever she goes.
Book club members remarked that they didn’t feel invested in any of the female characters as the author is quite dispassionate in her descriptions of them. Some of the women’s facile behaviour such as commenting that “at least we will lose weight” and their delight in securing a pair of tweezers to ensure they can at least keep themselves hairless do not particularly encourage any sympathy.
Moreover, it is clear not everyone is going to make it out and even those who do may not be headed towards a positive future. How 'salvation' eventually occurs is largely told through the eyes of two of the inmates - Verla and Yolanda - who become friends over time.
Verla and Yolanda are the most rounded characters in the book but their stories are told in different tenses and include passages of magic realism which keep the reader off balanced. Are they sane or mad? Nevertheless, Yolanda’s developing power as a huntress and Verla’s determined experimentation with local plants and fungi prove to be turning points in the narrative.
The title, The Natural Way of Things, comes from a passage in the book which asks: “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?”
Who is Charlotte Wood?
Charlotte Wood has been described as one of Australia’s most original and provocative writers.
Born in 1965 in Cooma, New South Wales, she is the author of six novels and a number of non-fictional works. The Natural Way of things was her fifth novel and was written in 2015. It won the Stella Prize, the Indie Book Awards Novel of the Year and Book of the Year and was short-listed for various other prizes including the Miles Franklin Award.
Charlotte has a PhD from the University of New South Wales, and other degrees including a Master of Creative Arts from UTS and a BA from Charles Sturt University. She has a background in journalism and has also taught writing classes.
She currently lives in Sydney.
In 2019 she was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia in recognition of her significant service to literature.
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