VOX imagines a
terrifying dystopian society where women are only allowed to utter 100 words a
day. They are forced to wear a metal
cuff that counts the number of words they say and for every word spoken over
the 100 word limit, the device delivers an electric shock of increasing
strength. Men have no such restrictions. The premise of the book sounded interesting, and I liked the look of
the cover (I know, I know, don’t judge a book etc, but we all do it) but it
wasn’t quite what I was expecting, and I suspect that that is the reason I
found it disappointing in many ways.
The protagonist is Jean, short
for Giovanna, a former neurolinguistics professor and researcher (like Dalcher
herself) who, when the book opens, is inwardly raging at her own lack of power
to stand up for herself and her small daughter, Sonia. She resents the
complicity of the men in her life – her husband Patrick and teenage son Steven
– in upholding the new order. However, Jean’s professional background then attracts
the notice of the government and she finds herself working on a project for
them, with untold consequences.
Having read “VOX” just after
finishing “The Testaments” and the latest series of the TV adaptation of “The
Handmaid’s Tale”, it’s clear that Dalcher took lots of inspiration from
Atwood’s Gilead, both the version in the book and the one adapted for TV; a
fact acknowledged by Dalcher herself. However the extent of the parallels between
the books make it seem closer to fan fiction than an original concept. Dalcher’s American setting is also run by a
“religious” fundamentalist government, and women in this world are also not
allowed to work, have their own bank accounts, or read and write. Even the main
character’s name, Jean, is just a phoneme away from the Hulu series’ June. The
book is written mostly as an internal monologue, like Offred’s. The narrator is
also unreliable by turns, like Offred; one minute telling us something
happened, the next telling us that it didn’t actually happen that way. Both
Jean and June are also motivated to join the resistance out of a desire to
protect the daughters they already have, and the unborn children they end up
carrying. Jean even has a bolshy best friend, just like Offred: Jackie Juarez
has Moira’s direct, irreverent way of speaking, and takes the initially
politically apathetic Jean to task for accepting the gradual erosion of their
civil liberties. This, I suppose, is one of the main messages of the book –
that we must use our voices in whichever way we can, or risk losing them
completely. This is clear enough on its own, but in case we didn’t get the
point, Dalcher hammers the point home using the oft-quoted
“for
evil to triumph, all it takes is for good men to do nothing”.
The book definitely delivers
shocks (see what I did there?) in abundance. In some ways it is even more
chilling than The Handmaid’s Tale, as in this world even little girls –
toddlers – are fitted with the metal word-counter. Children are co-opted as
agents of the state to monitor their parents, and we then find out that the
government has plans to go to almost ridiculously extreme lengths to control
the population. Ordinary people are slowly inured without realising it, to
colluding in the oppression of others. As Offred says in “The Handmaid’s Tale”,
“Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death
before you knew it.”
However, in this particular world
we are only twelve months post-revolution, so there are some obvious teething
problems. The technology can be compromised, for a start. Secondly, girls are
taught mathematics in school, because
“you
need math [to run a household], but not spelling. Not literature. Not a voice.”
This is a disappointingly
reductive view of maths. Any mathmo worth their salt will tell you that
mathematics is a beautiful language all on its own – a system of symbols from
which meaning can be derived. Presumably they need to learn times tables in
order to be able manage a household budget properly, but how do they teach even
basic arithmetic without reading, writing and speaking, at least a little bit? There
are other problems but I’ll stick with these two points for now.
I also found the political
underpinnings of this society to be a little shaky. In this world, the “Pure”
movement isn’t motivated by anything more than an alt-right-esque nostalgia for
traditional gender roles. Although
family planning and birth control aren’t permitted, there is no driving reason
for it, unlike the fertility crisis and falling birth rates in Gilead. As a
result, there is no option to explore the idea that the regime is trying –
however misguidedly – to solve a very real problem. True fanatics sincerely believe
they are working for the greater good, which is what makes Atwood’s Serena Joy
and Aunt Lydia so interesting. In Dalcher’s world, however, the government is cartoonishly
portrayed as unsophisticated, bordering on unhinged, power-hungry misogynists
who just want women to shut up forever.
Many of the characters are two-dimensional,
which seems like a lost chance to explore how patriarchy harms men as well as
women. Patrick is portrayed as a
pathetic, spineless coward; Steven is greedy and obnoxious (though Jean and
Patrick only have themselves to blame with that one); Morgan is caricatured as
an insecure little man whose small stature and high-pitched voice are referred
to over and over again; and Lorenzo is a walking cliché – tall, dark and handsome,
brainy and fearlessly supportive to boot. Incidentally, I didn’t like the
romance between Jean and Lorenzo; even though Patrick was so irritatingly
bland, I felt no sympathy for Jean’s infidelity, perhaps because she is just so
unlikeable as a character. I even ended up feeling slightly sorry for him,
which is more than can be said for the supremely self-absorbed Jean.
That said, “VOX” certainly kept
me turning the pages, as I wanted to find out what would happen next, and I
wanted to see some form of poetic justice for all of the INjustices seen throughout the novel, especially as Dalcher invests
so much time trying to stoke our indignation. The linguistic jargon could have
done with a little more editing, but I understand the intent behind it. There
are more POC characters than in “The Handmaid’s Tale”, although they are all
middle-class and university educated; it would be interesting to see more about
what happens at the intersections of race, gender and class. And at one point
she does show some self-awareness of what she’s doing with the genre, when
we’re told “there’s always a resistance”. That part made me laugh, and I wished
I could have seen more about the workings of the resistance, and the people
involved in it.
All in all “VOX” was an
entertaining read which was both shocking and infuriating when it described the
different ways of curtailing women’s freedoms. However it was also at times frustrating,
as I felt it had so much more potential than it ultimately delivered.
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