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Blue Ticket by Sophie Mackintosh review – a dark fable about free will

<span>Photograph: Alamy</span>
Photograph: Alamy

There is great power, Sophie Mackintosh has discovered, in taking a familiar thing –so familiar that we no longer see it clearly – moving it to a place slightly adjacent to our world, then bringing it into closer and closer focus until we can see nothing else. In her first, Booker-longlisted novel, The Water Cure, it was a family, three girls and their parents, alone in a grand house on an unnamed coast, with white walls and swimming pools cracking under relentless sunshine. Only like this, argued the parents, could the girls be protected from the toxic air elsewhere; anywhere, specifically, where men might live. In her new novel, the isolation of the house has been expanded to include an entire unnamed country where, when their periods begin, girls are given either a white ticket, because they are required to have children, or a blue ticket and an implant, meaning that they never will. The two groups of girls are then separated from each other, and usually never see each other again.

In this authoritarian, patriarchal world only things that are seen close up – a dress, a drink, the boot of a car, the locket containing a ticket that every woman must wear, and above all the female body with all its layers of perception, physical, mental and emotional – are detailed. Everything else is vague; this is a dreamworld, centred on a kind of vivid, claustrophobic myopia surrounded by an undifferentiated cruelty. Mackintosh’s prose matches her method: often beautiful and otherworldly, violent and tender, reverberating into the darkness. Allegory can work like this, and myth, and fairytale, though one or two moments when Mackintosh self-consciously summons the tropes of the latter can be a little too obvious – as when Calla, a blue-ticket woman who has decided that she wants a baby so much she will risk everything, finds herself on the run and in a dark wood, in a house with a little old woman wielding instruments of life and death.

There is still nothing unusual, even in 2020, and in the west, in a young woman being surprised or frightened by her first bleed, while pregnancy is still so shrouded in romantic obfuscation that only last year the Guardian published a piece about some of its more baroque effects on a woman’s body and received hundreds of comments. By placing Calla in a system that deliberately withholds basic information about her body, and then concentrating on that body, Mackintosh is able to foreground a problem common to women all over the world. She is especially good on female physicality – on the mess and strength and, in extremis, the capacity for violence – and on the psychological effects of a denial of this physicality.

Slivers of time go missing for Calla, when her mind has effectively risen up to protect itself. She worries about the way, under extreme stress, there can be “only white in the space between my thoughts”; at the depersonalisation she frequently feels, and the sympathetic discolouration of everything around her, even springtime (“there was a clockwork ticking inside the sour green buds”). The colour pink – that condescending shorthand for the feminine – soaks through the novel: the dress in which the teenage Calla learns her fate is pink satin; walls are peach, milkshakes are pink, congealing, the sky is an ugly pink … pink is blood and threat, curdled promise, bad faith. It is also, importantly, lack of choice. This is a world in which only men have agency; in which female privacy, emotions and choices are the ultimate rebellion.

Related: Sophie Mackintosh: 'Suddenly I really wanted a baby - I resented that it felt outside my control'

I increasingly felt, however, that Mackintosh’s project was not aided by refusing men the same quality of attention. No one, male or female, is especially nice here (a political choice, and an important one), but the men in both her books have almost no redeeming features: they are predators, users, manipulators, weak, violent, incipient rapists – or, if fathers, recipients of unearned veneration and gifts. Any kindness they show is conditional and easily retracted; there is little in the way of individuality. Of course, patriarchy warps those it privileges as well as those it negates, but this reads as simplistic. I also became uncomfortable, in the end, with the characterisation of blue-ticket Calla examining her existence: “I was no longer going to live like that, jumping for scraps.” Yes, the book is narrated from Calla’s point of view, and these opinions belong to her; we often diminish the thing of which we fight to be free. But the narrative voice seems to channel damaging cliches about childless women; and after all the clear-eyed harshness, the idea of maternity, of being a “true mother”, is mushily romanticised. A more persuasive complexity has been lost – as though Mackintosh set something running that was so powerful, it got away from her.

Blue Ticket by Sophie Mackintosh is published by Hamish Hamilton (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.