Sophie Macintosh’s Blue Ticket is not classic feminist dystopia. Yes, it is concerned with legislated fertility, a world where women’s bodies are monitored like science projects by condescending medics.But the horror here is not impregnation but unwanted childlessness. Blue tickets, dispensed (randomly? It’s not clear) by a machine on a girl’s first bleed, decree a childless future; white tickets the opposite. Victims are not raped handmaids but sexually liberated working women, desperate to conceive and forbidden from doing so. Our narrator is Calla, a blue ticket, who grows increasingly dissatisfied with her lot, nurturing a ‘new and dark feeling’ inside herself. ‘I had never felt a baby’s leg in my hand, but my heart knew the sensation it was after.’
Calla brutally removes her forcibly implanted contraceptive device and, pregnant, skips town, heading for a familiar yet opaque land of shadily sketched ‘seasonal towns’ and hotels with ‘swirled paisley carpet giving way to square pale tiles’. Men see through her ‘white ticket act’ and assault her; women seem supportive, but are they? She meets Marisol, another renegade. In the background lurks the constant threat of discovery by ‘emissaries’.
It’s an intriguing premise. The madonna/whore dichotomy fed to women as freedom and fate. Liberation is an illusion, a patriarchal manipulation that uses women for sex and booze. Calla smokes and drinks ‘obediently’, but wonders what defect makes her unsuitable for motherhood. Unshackled from choice she struggles to find her true self:
Always I had taken pride in being alone and now all this, the soggy desire to be boxed in a house with people I was bound to. I tried to own this new desire the way I had owned others, but it was shameful to me.
The early chapters are best, thrumming with the feverish unknowability of puberty.
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