The Carhullan Army -- Sarah Hall

Post-apocalyptic narratives have always exerted an ineluctable pull on me. From happening upon Jean Ure's harrowing Plague 99 trilogy (now, scandalously, out of print) as a child, through a period of downright obsession with the dodgy New Zealand television series The Tribe in my mid-teens, to more grown-up explorations of the genre in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Year of the Flood, I have been captivated by depictions of societies shattered, of the old world order wiped out in one fell swoop, and of what happens to those left struggling to survive.

The Carhullan Army (Faber, 2007) opens with a nameless woman preparing to make her escape from a Cumbrian town which is under the auspices of an oppressive regime. The woman, who we know only as 'Sister', abandons a husband she no longer loves, and sets off in search of Carhullan, a farm-commune consisting solely of women, where she hopes to find sanctuary. She is met, however, by a gun barrel and a punch that fractures her shoulder, and is promptly incarcerated in a tiny metal tank for three days while the women of Carhullan wait for her to crack.

So far, so different from the happy-clappy agrarian utopias of the kind that feature in Year of the Flood or Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time. Carhullan's women are taut and unsentimental, prepared to do whatever it takes to protect their lifestyle. Their leader is Jackie, whose language is blunt and crass, but whose actions shimmer with intellect and idealism. 'Sister' passes the initiation test, and is subsumed into the world of the commune.

And that is pretty much that for the next hundred pages. We learn a lot more about the day-to-day functionality of the commune, which has been intricately and admirably imagined by Hall. Her descriptions of the commune's fare are wonderful - bowls of porridge with butter forming 'an oily yellow pool in a crater in the centre', and the 'puckered strip' of raw deer tongue that Sister is pressured into eating. I have a soft spot for writers who can render mundanities beautiful in this way. We learn about the work that keeps the commune ticking over, the peat-cutting with which Sister assists, and also about the handful of undernourished men who live in a kind of satellite commune.

However, engaged though I was by this depiction of a "cosy catastrophe" lifestyle, I was unable to discern any real driving plot until page 151, when Jackie, the leader, starts to assert her own agenda and forces the women to either support her plans for revolution or leave Carhullan. Sister commits herself to Jackie's brutal training, which we experience in wincing detail . . . but all the while as I was reading, I was conscious of the pages-to-go thinning between my right thumb and the back cover, and all I could think was: how on earth is Hall going to squash the actual rebellion into the space she has left?

The answer, of course, is that she doesn't. We cut from the training up at Carhullan directly into the dying moments of the last battle scene, and within two bloody, bullet-riddled pages the novel is extinguished. It's unexpected, and my gut reaction was to deem it a bit of a cop-out on the author's part - all that slow tip-toeing build-up, and then - wooosh! - one giant leap over most of the action. Upon reflection, though, I'm inclined to think that this omission was a conscious decision to place all the emphasis on the women's path to war: the act of battle itself was not as important as the philosophy behind it. And indeed, preservation of this philosophy is the reason why Jackie commands Sister to surrender at the end - to 'make them understand what we did and who we were'.

Ultimately, Hall's exploration of feminism in a post-apocalyptic environment makes for a fascinating and worthwhile read. Do the women truly succeed in empowering themselves, or do they - with their army fatigues, their cropped hair, their guns and their bombs -  merely ape a patriarchal template of power? I'm not entirely sure. All I know is, the scene I found the most powerful was the one where Jackie asks Sister why she allowed the regime to fit her with a contraceptive coil that she emphatically did not want. Sister tries to explain that she didn't feel she had a choice in the matter, and Jackie says: "Suppose you had that old gun I've fixed up. Suppose you had it in your hand and the doctor asked you to lie back and open your legs wide. Suppose if you said no, he was going to make you. Would it make any difference, that gun?"  "Yes," Sister says. "It would." 

As someone who has never thought about guns much before, the realisation that in such a situation, such a weapon would make a difference to me, too, really chilled my blood. Food for thought.