Tania's Reviews > Afterland

"You can’t imagine how much the world can change in six months. You just can’t."

Except that, now, of course we all can...

3.5 stars rounded up to 4. I’ve read all of Lauren Beukes novels and my favorites are Zoo City and The Shining Girls. The thing I love most about this South African author is her knack for wildly inventive plot-lines – criminals who gets assigned animal companions or time travelling serial killers. That said, I thought the story line for Afterland was the most “normal” of everything she’s done until now – not necessarily a bad thing, especially in a time when most of us are drawn to easy reading books.

The story is set in the future where 99% of men are dead after a global man plague. Cole and her twelve-year-old son Miles are on the run from her sister and a group of boy traffickers, but they also have to be on the look out for the Department of Men who wants to quarantine all surviving males. I found the mention of hand washing, sold out hand sanitizer, conspiracy theories, financial markets crashing and hospitals being overwhelmed a bit eerie and very prescient.

The writing is edgy, and I especially liked the parts where Billy (sociopath sister) is high on drugs while trying to catch up to Cole and Miles, as I felt like I was deep under the influence myself. The author uses a cool trick to point out how chauvinistic some of us are still in our thinking, by always mentioning a job description before the description of the person, and I found myself having to constantly change my picture to female from male a few sentences after we were introduced to a cop, security guard, taxi driver etc.

The real issue being addressed in this dystopia is probably women and violence. We are still very much programmed to think of women as nurturing even after watching shows like Game of Thrones and Ozark, so the brutality between females feels unnatural and/or uncomfortable, but as the one of the characters in Afterland notes – “But girls have more to prove. You have to hit harder, meaner, crueler if you want to step into the Big Men’s shoes” when the future is going to be female.