At the same time the
CEO of one of Australia’s largest retailers, David Jones, resigned in the wake
of a sexual harassment complaint from a staff member from their marketing department.
He walked away with close to a $2 million payout and his statement to the media
said:
"At two recent company functions I behaved
in a manner unbecoming of the high standard expected of a chief executive
officer to a female staff member.
"As a result of this conduct I have
offered my resignation to the David Jones board and we have agreed on the
mutual termination of my employment with the company, effective immediately.
"As a chief executive officer and as a
person I have a responsibility to many, and today I formally acknowledge that I
have committed serious errors of judgment and have inexcusably let down the
female staff member. I have also let down my partner, my family, all my staff,
the board and our shareholders. I apologise to everyone I have let down.
"In resigning immediately it is my hope
that I will minimise the impact of my errors of judgment on all and on David
Jones, a company I have been proud to be employed by for 13 years and have had
the honour of leading for the last 7 years.
"I would like to thank my colleagues for
their support during my time with the company. I am very sorry to be leaving in
these circumstances and wish all involved with David Jones continued success.
"My partner and I will be overseas for the
foreseeable future."
These are just two
examples of the media reports from Australia and I am sure there would be a
plethora of similar reports throughout the western world.
But what has that got
to do with reviewing books? Recently shortlisted for the 2016 Victorian Premier’s
Literary Award, Charlotte Wood’s “The Natural Way of Things” is an allegorical
tale that delves deep into the world of sexual misconduct, predator behaviour
and the preconceived notions of the male offenders walking away from their
actions whilst the women are left to deal with their demons.
Our novel has two
protagonists, Verla and Yolanda, who suddenly wake, after being drugged, in a
facility where they are forced to wear course modest clothing, have their heads
shaved, are marched mercilessly for miles, fed poor rations, drink bore water
and sleep in run-down shearer’s cottages, all without talking. What has
happened to them? What is their link (there are a number of other girls in the
same predicament)? Why are they there? Slowly we leave of each of their pasts,
and intern who had an affair with a high ranking politician, a high profile sex
case with footballers, is this what links them?
Before dawn she wakes again with the birds. Kookaburras, cockatoos,
somewhere far off. Her back aches, she needs desperately to piss. Light seams
the door and the window slot, cracks between the iron panels, softly at first,
then in sharp bright lines. The room…it is not a room – what is it? A shed, a
stall of animals. A kennel with a dirty wooden floor and corrugated-iron walls
battened with wood. A kennel bog enough to stand up in, to contain a single
iron-framed bed.
This novel is not a
comfortable read, as it forces you to confront the everyday preconceptions,
bias, humiliation of young women being forced to confront who they are?
What would people in their old lives be saying about these girls? Would
they be called missing? Would some
documentary program on the ABC that nobody watched, or one of those thin
newspapers nobody read, somehow connect their cases, find the thread to make
them a story? The Lost Girls, they could be called. 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 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, they marshalled themselves into this prison where
they had made their beds, and now, once more, were lying in them.
As I would rather not contain spoilers in my reviews I'll have to let you read this on your own to know the fate of the girls trapped in remote Australia, with three guards, who also seem to be trapped. This is not the usual
style of novel that I read, nor review on my blog, however as it was
shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award 2016, I borrowed a copy
from my local library and although unlike my usual “eclectic” reads it is a
worthwhile novel to read. It raises a number of pertinent points about female
sexuality, about male predatory behaviour, about social norms, language. It
brought to mind language and the common usage of phrases such as “domestic
violence victim”, “sexual assault victim”, instead of “he hit her”, “he raped
her”, the female being the “victim” instead of the male being the perpetrator.
Reminiscent of Emma
Donoghue’s “Room” but with a more hopeless edge, this is a dystopian novel
about capture, of being trapped even though you may have escaped, of not being able
to find a way out of your own existence, it’s not a case of “where you are” but
“who you are”?
As the high profile
cases I highlighted in my opening, the men involved in these cases have moved
on, and in some cases are making money from their behaviour, whereas the women
involved are still harbouring the scars of these men’s behaviour. Put that to
an allegorical backdrop and you have Charlotte Wood’s latest novel, a thought
provoking and brave novel, one that may not be comfortable to read, but one
that would surely elicit a lot of discussion around the book-club tables.
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