When She Woke

Hillary Jordan

HarperCollins

Otago Daily Times, December 17th 2011

As a general rule I try and avoid describing a book by reference to others, particularly when such a comparison is presented on the back cover.  Rules are made to be broken; in When She Woke, Hillary Jordan has combined The Scarlet Letter and The Handmaid’s Tale to produce and absorbing and frighteningly plausible glimpse of the future.

The novel is set in America a few decades from now, close enough in time that most differences from the present day are unsurprising (religious conservatism is in the ascendant, for example, and 42 states have overturned Roe v Wade). But a revolution has occurred in the justice system; rather than facing incarceration, criminals are treated with a virus that alters their skin colour according to the nature of their offence, and all but the most dangerous released to live (or die) at the sufferance of the wider community. 

It opens on the first day of Hannah Elizabeth Payne’s sixteen-year sentence as Red for the murder of her unborn child.  Doubly condemned for refusing to identify the father –the charismatic young founder of the Way, Truth and Life Worldwide Ministry, Aidan Dale – she must face a hostile and dangerous world alone, abandoned by her family, her Church, and all who knew and loved her.  But not everybody is as quick to judge her, and there are some who are prepared to offer her not only friendship but also the possibility of escape.  The price of freedom, however, is the renunciation of everything and everyone she has ever known, including Aidan.

Although this summary suggests high melodrama, When She Woke is actually a gripping and thought-provoking story, not least because it draws strongly on reality.  Hannah’s covert flight, passed from person to person and reliant on the kindness of strangers is the same as that of the slaves who escaped the South by the underground railway.  The punitive moral judgement she faces for having sinned against conservative majority is as old as society itself (the story is prefaced by a quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s archetypal novel), and the move towards the all to visible branding of criminals represented by metachroming itself is all to believable given the growing calls for citizens to be allowed to exercise vigilante justice. 

While I hesitate to put Hillary Jordan in the same league as Margaret Atwood quite yet, she is an author whose progress I intend to follow.

https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/thought-provoking-glimpse-future