There
are several ways to read Jane Rogers’ The Testament of Jessie Lamb. One
is to consider it as a not-overly-thought-through near-future science fiction novel.
It is based on a rather vague premise about a virus which produces an effect
similar to CJD, but only in women, and only if they become pregnant: Maternal
Death Syndrome. The child may survive but the mother will die. The virus seems
to have been released at airports, thus ensuring maximum distribution across
the world, and women die in massive numbers. There is no escape. Who caused it,
no one seems to know, nor why in particular at this time. And these are
questions which are not answered. Most of this happens off the page; the only
real indication of its full extent comes in the mention at the beginning of the
novel of a mass funeral at York Minster and the huge traffic jams this causes,
and later in talk of memorials. There are other hints: a scene in a charity
shop when Jessie disposes of some of her possessions is especially telling – the
shop is already full of containers of women’s clothes that no one wants to keep
or to buy.
However,
what Rogers does not do, except in the broadest, vaguest way, is to give any
indication of how this affects daily life at the most practical levels. For
example, what happens to the economy when a large part of the workforce isn’t
there any more, and another significant chunk of the workforce has to suddenly
consider childcare? Somehow the world seems to continue much as normal, yet the
last pre-2012 fuel crisis showed how close to the edge this country habitually
teeters. As one or two commentators have noted, this novel seems to fit into an
older model of science fiction –John Wyndham would be an excellent example –
which relies less on hyper-accurate, heavily researched detail about what would
happen if, and more on creating a certain kind of mood.
For
example, close to the beginning of the novel, Jessie and her friend Sal are
talking about the impact of MDS for the population, coming to a realisation
that the world they are familiar with is probably going to end soon.
We thought about our houses slowly falling to bits, the doors blowing open, the roofs caving in, birds and animals nesting there. ‘Some other species will dominate,’ said Sal, and we began to argue about what it might be. All the animals in zoos etc would have to be let out before the last people died. Which would probably kill off a few more of us even sooner. And those animals that could adapt to life in their new territory might take over. There might be wolves again in England, and bears. Tigers might live off untended herds of cows. Tree branches would spread out over roads, and hedges would grow huge and wild, and weeds burst through the tarmac. After a hundred years the world would be one great nature reserve, with all the threatened species breeding again, and great shoals of cod in the sea, eagles nesting in old church spires. It made me think of the garden of Eden, how it was supposed to be beautiful before Adam and Even messed things up. (9)
Wyndham,
to the best of my recollection, never actively considered the zoos but this
excerpt reminds me sharply of the latter parts of The Day of the Triffids,
when Masen returns to London for provisions, which in turn seems to draw
heavily on Richard Jeffries’ After London. This similarity to Triffids
and its ilk is not coincidental, I think. Wyndham and Rogers are less concerned
with the ‘how did this happen?’ and far more preoccupied with ‘how do we manage
now it has happened?’ And by ‘manage’ I mean on an emotional level rather than
the nuts and bolts of day-to-day survival.
Rogers’
refusal to engage with ‘how did this happen’ is helped by her choice of
protagonist, Jessie Lamb, sixteen years old, and as self-absorbed as any
sixteen-year-old trying to figure out how the world works. To begin with, MDS
doesn’t really figure in Jessie’s life except as a traffic jam. Only later does
it begin to acquire a name and a face: a girl at school, a friend’s aunt, and
then personal significance when Jessie, along with all the other girls,
receives a compulsory contraceptive implant at school. Events elsewhere are
filtered through Jessie’s consciousness, what she sees on tv, hears from other
people; the picture is fragmentary because it doesn’t impinge on Jessie
herself.
But
as the crisis continues, Jessie becomes more and more aware of how MDS will
change her life. On the one hand, what is the point of continuing with things
like GCSE exams? On the other, she and her friends experience a growing sense
of impatience. Why isn’t anyone doing anything? They blame the adults and
decide they must take action themselves, but in what way? At the behest of her
friend Baz, Jessie attends a meeting where young people are trying to decide
what it is they want to do, and incidentally, who to blame. There are any
number of scapegoats available, from climate change deniers to research
scientists, and any number of strategies. One girl wants to set up centres for
motherless children, run by the children themselves, without interference from
adults. Others want to promote a greener lifestyle, by force if necessary.
Still others want to take the campaign to the scientists, Animal Liberation
Front-style. For her own part, Jessie is convinced of the need to punish ‘old
people’ for what they’ve done, but her perception of who is to blame is no
clearer than that.
Jessie’s
journey through this confused post-MDS landscape might be an allegory for the
teenage experience generally, of being half-child, half-adult, expected to make
decisions then criticised for doing so. It could also be related to the journey
that Bill Masen makes across England, moving from community to community,
searching for Josella, but also testing and discarding any number of models for
living in the world shaped by Triffids.
Jessie’s
understanding of what she needs to do comes gradually, influenced by a number
of things. First, there is the experience of her mercurial aunt, Mandy,
recently dumped by her partner, is desperate for a child of her own, about to
undergo fertility treatment until it is cancelled by the MDS crisis. Later,
Mandy becomes involved with the Noahs, a new religious group who, as their name
implies, are trying to preserve something of the present to take into the
future, but they reject her as a potential mother because she is too old.
Jessie’s friend, Sal, is raped by a group of her boyfriend’s friends, and
Jessie herself is spat at, threatened and robbed by a group of boys. Young
women are suddenly expendable in the eyes of young men, and treated
accordingly.
At
the same time, young women are intensely valuable as a commodity, it having
been discovered that so long as they are kept sedated and on life-support,
babies can be brought to term. These are the Sleeping Beauties. People are very
excited by this possibility of continuing the human race, not least as it buys
time to do the research to counter MDS, but already different groups are in
contention, for research, against it, pro-Sleeping Beauties, against them. A
woman’s body is once again a battleground, and for Jessie this is to become all
too personal when she makes the decision to volunteer to become a Sleeping
Beauty herself, prompted by her aunt’s experiences in part but also, it seems,
by her sense of what is likely to happen to her in the world as it changes. To
become a Sleeping Beauty – and this is quite explicit if one actually thinks
back to the fairy tale[1] – is to be protected, not
by a hedge of thorns but by the laboratory. One might counter that with
thoughts of Brave New World but from Jessie’s point of view, the
decision is not as bizarre as it might at first appear. More disturbing
undoubtedly is the response of Jessie’s parents, who imprison their daughter –
another version of the Sleeping Beauty story, if you like – in the hope they
can persuade her to change her mind. Most of Jessie’s testament is written
while she is imprisoned; most of the rest of it while she is awaiting the
implantation of the fertilised egg.
We
are meant to understand Jessie’s decision as being one that is taken freely, an
adult decision made with the full understanding of what it involves, and it
would be wrong to try in any way to undermine Jessie’s own perception of what
she is doing. Nonetheless, Rogers does an excellent job of showing the vested
interests that mass around her, from the creepy Iain, from the youth movement
she was involved with, using her to promote the cause, which is itself in part
a front for his own predatory activities. Her parents’ refusal to accept her
decision represents a denial of their daughter’s having reached adulthood, no
matter how much it is couched with scientific explanations from her father, who
works in a research lab. Rosa, another girl about to become a Sleeping Beauty,
is obsessed with the notion that in this way she will find love and celebrity
at last, although she will not be there to experience it. Lurking behind that
is the less well articulated but all the more disturbing assumption that the
human race must persist, come what may, and that any means is acceptable in
order to ensure its survival. Inevitably, this will be the burden that women
bear (and one can already imagine a scenario in which it is discovered that men
can safely carry babies to term and themselves survive; what then for women?).
Yet,
I remain in two minds about this novel. It is, as I’ve noted, representative of
a certain kind of science fiction, and done rather well, though I don’t think
it is especially innovative. But there is something slightly odd about it that
I cannot quite pin down from just one reading. I’ve been watching Dominic
Sandbrook’s tv series about the 1970s, the decade in which I turned from a
teenager into an adult, matching my fragmentary perceptions of it against
Sandbrook’s admittedly sketchy account. I am reminded on the one hand that
Rogers catches that sense of uncertainty very well, evoking the internal and
the external anxieties of being a teenager. But at the same time, assuming we
take the 1970s to stretch into the early 1980s, far enough to embrace the
beginnings of the Greenham Common Peace Camp and a new iteration of the women’s
movement, as well as the sudden awareness of AIDS. I can’t help feeling that
Rogers is reaching back to this in order to underpin her creation of a
near-future society rather than drawing on the contemporary world as one might
expect. Perhaps it’s just me but the novel and the series seem to resonate in a
way that the novel doesn’t with contemporary experience, no matter how many
references to climate change denial and CJD she includes. Which leaves me with
an odd sense of dissatisfaction that at present I can’t quite dispel. It may be
that a second reading is required as this novel is rather more subtly layered
than it might appear to be at first sight.
[1]
And there is at least one version of the story in which Sleeping Beauty awakes
to discover that the Prince has been and gone, and she has become pregnant in
the meantime.
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