Author: Talulah Riley
ISBN No:
Review date: 09/05/2024
No of pages:
Publisher: Hodder
Publisher URL:
https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/talulah-riley/the-quickening/9781473640870/
Year of publication:
Brief:
price
£-
This review is unlike others, and not only because the book is a novel and not about private security, writes Mark Rowe.
I had better explain how I came to own a copy of The Quickening yesterday. At the Women in Security (WiS) afternoon tea to mark International Women’s Day, I was a winner in the raffle and this paperback was among the prizes. Although rude of me, ignoring neighbours, I couldn’t help then dipping into the book (pictured). I have an eccentric habit of sometimes beginning a book at the back, first the final chapter, then the last but one, and so on. This seemed to work for The Quickening, as each chapter was narrated by a character, male or female. It’s set in a nightmarish England where women have power and men either accept it or have to take ‘The Pill’ (the story has a number of such names with the portentous ‘The’ added). Such men are then chemically, psychologically emasculated (the book closes with a man, Arthur, in ‘grateful submission’).
Such stories of alternative societies enter a crowded field – why can’t an author give us a tale of an ideal, happy future?! The torture of Arthur has echoes of the Ministry of Love in George Orwell’s 1984, when the hero Winston Smith had to admit that two plus two does not necessarily equal four; in The Quickening, a man has to accept that the male and female are different; and that we’re not each human.
However I didn’t go any further into the book after the castration scene, and the morning after nor do I feel like opening it, still in the WiS canvas bag (whose arms I tied, to make it that much harder for the book to escape!?).
It’s left me pondering about the endings of such novels. Riley ends with a page of acknowledgements. Orwell ended 1984 oddly, even anti-climatically with an essay about IngSoc, the development of the English language in 1984 (and projected ahead to 2050 whereby subversive thought in words would become impossible). In The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, which also has relations between men and women that readers will find troubling, Atwood ends perhaps with a nod to 1984, as if in the future, and academics are looking back at the period. It’s striking that Riley, having imagined such a twisted society, ends it sweetly by thanking ‘mummy and daddy’. It’s difficult to imagine Orwell writing a page of acknowledgements. Perhaps it’s a sign of social change, that authors feel obliged to thank those who worked to make the book possible, by naming them in print. Although as Riley also gives a mention to her ex-husband, Elon Musk, one of the most famous men on the planet, perhaps an acknowledgements page is merely a chance to show off.
If I were to offer advice to Talulah Riley – as she wrote such a vivid castration, I’d rather it were from a distance – I’d ask if she should get a commission off a magazine editor (if such things still exist). As an actress she has to be part of imagined stories; as an author she has given us an imaginary England that I find too frightening to re-enter; perhaps she should try to write some factual pieces, to engage with the real England (The Quickening does have a prime minister, a Home Office and a Milton Keynes)? To think of a couple of only private security possibilities: the hired patrollers walking high streets for business improvement districts; the constabularies at some cathedrals; or the Women in Security gatherings (or the equivalent, I presume, ‘Women in Construction’ or ‘Women on the railways’). It may be the step in her development that she requires. To compare Orwell, the author I’ve been fondest of for 40 years, he wrote fact as much as fiction: he was outstanding as an essayist, a poor journalist when he tried it (though he’d talked to ordinary people for Down and Out in Paris and London, he seemed unable to talk to strangers to gather news), and several unremarkable novels before the still important 1984. I’d query whether he ever (he died at 46) realised where his strengths as a writer lay.
I presume that Talulah Riley has so far led a life in glamorous and even fabulous company, that if told would fascinate a fair part of the planet. She would do the world a considerable service if she or anyone from the inside were to chronicle it. You have to wonder why it is, that she has written an entirely imaginary story instead.
