AustLit

'Opening Charlotte Wood's fifth novel, The Natural Way of Things, is like waking up in hell. Ten women have been drugged, kidnapped, hauled out to the middle of nowhere, and imprisoned in a former sheep station with three hired keepers. Almost immediately the women recognize each other from news coverage and piece together the sole link between them: that each has been involved in some kind of sex scandal, and now each has been carefully "disappeared," although the details of the operation—how it was coordinated and funded, why they were selected, and who planned the whole [End Page 318] thing—remain mysterious. Two-thirds of the way through the novel, there is a very short segment in which someone wonders what people would make of their absence: "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 center, as if womanhood itself were the cause of these things?" (133). But those questions quickly fade again into the background, and it begins to look like this novel is not exactly a feminist cautionary fable along the lines of The Handmaid's Tale. We never learn anything about the politics or motives of the cabal that so efficiently engineers this mass kidnapping. Certainly there is a running critique of routine Australian sexism; Wood is particularly keen to show us how sexist attitudes have been assimilated by the ten victims, to varying degrees. But the focus of the novel is less political than primordial. This is a kind of prison experiment, the jailers trapped inside with the prisoners, and everyone driven or reduced to something less than fully human. Or perhaps we were never as human as we thought?' (Introduction)