Science fiction is one option, enabling an author to examine contemporary concerns in a dystopian future pushed to extremes; witness George Orwell's 1984 or Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.
British author Sarah Hall joins this list of 'what if' novelists with Daughters of the North, placing her tale in a an area she grew up in - northern England - in a future impacted by global warming and climate change.
In the aftermath of massive flooding and the breakdown of society, a sinister Authority assumes control, herding survivors into urban zones. There they work in factories and refineries and live in overcrowded conditions, subsisting solely on canned food.
Worst of all, every woman is fitted with mandatory contraceptive coils. Random checks violate personal privacy, and reproduction is determined by a lottery.
One woman - the novel's narrator, who calls herself Sister - dreams of escaping to a legendary rural community of women - Carhullan, an isolated farm and estate high in the mountains of the Lake District. Established by a woman named Jackie Nixon a decade before the flood, the farm was self-sufficient, growing fruits, vegetables and grains and raising livestock, and maintaining an eco-feminist survivalist existence.
But when the narrator escapes from Authority control and makes it to Carhullan, she finds it is not quite the utopian existence she had hoped for.
I interviewed Sarah Hall about Daughters of the North, female utopias, and whether readers may respond differently to her novel based on gender.
You've imagined England as a police state. The one place where self-rule still exists is all-female Carhullan, in an isolated corner of the Lake District. Could the novel have been rooted somewhere else?
No, I don't think it could have been set elsewhere. That isn't to say that the conceit of the novel – these unofficial zones in areas of wilderness populated by illegals – could not have worked in Scotland or Wales, Exmoor, or somewhere else equally remote, but I continue to have a dialogue with the North of England in my work. I'm interested in these historically charged uplands, the 'disputed lands' as they were known, and Carhullan – the real farm – sits at the highest point in the valley where I was brought up.
The book contains the idea that natural catastrophe felt at home, on the doorstep, is the kind that really wakens us to our presently ill-judged relationship with the environment. I wanted this book to be set in my neck of the woods. In part I wanted to bring matters home – the way the floods of 2005 in the UK literally did. We are all beginning to feel complicit in ecological damage and climate change – and if we aren't, perhaps we should be. So, yes, my inclination, and it was not without personal anxiety and distaste, was to devastate the north of England, to degrade the place I'm so familiar with, alter the temperature and the plant life, wreck the river-lying villages, have it be a darkly projected world.
Is isolation essential to a female-centric society?
I think isolation is an important aspect for separatist, 'utopian' societies if you are attempting to create them – literally and in literature. There is of course the Lord Of the Flies model, the 'left alone to run amok and become extreme' scenario. In this way human behavior is really placed on a specimen dish.
The valley I'm from, where Carhullan lies, is remote, even by Lakeland standards, so I think I had an early taste of that singular independent mindset that forms when influence and tempering from the world beyond the valley wanes.
I lived in America for six years and became fascinated with survivalist groups – like the groups in the woods of Idaho, and the notorious cults. America is a country that, philosophically and politically, makes room for beliefs and practices of all kinds, and it has space to host them. On our small island it's a little more difficult to search out our wildernesses, and to be truly libertarian.
There are qualities the North of England has that have a bearing on the character of some of the women in my novel – especially Jackie Nixon; she is a product of the territory (as well as a product of her military training and scholarship). Her intimate knowledge of the environment is essential. She is stubborn, magnetic, proud, defended, and ultimately ruthless. It's hard to say these qualities are exclusive to a particular topography, but they are unquestionably present in people from this territory.
For me to create an authentic survivalist community I felt I needed to draw on what I knew about Cumbrian mountain farming – its hardships and tenacities – as it was important for the naturalistic depiction I wanted. The way people farm today – sheep, cattle, food supplies - is not dissimilar to the way they have for hundreds of years.
So in a science fiction realm, where civilization is suddenly snatched away, it would be possible to rely on this arcane model. Farming in this country is rather disrespected at the moment, and that's a shame. There's never any question that the literal farm is a success in the novel – its self-sufficiency and productivity are not in question. It is the motivation and the militancy of its inhabitants that provides the basis for the book's debate.
