Afterland

This book was published mid-2020, so was written before the Corona pandemic. Not sure if people are ready to read about pandemics again, but here we were. I seem to have a theme this year after first reading The Power and now Afterland, to read about society changes when women are suddenly in power. In Naomi Alderman's book it was because suddenly women were more powerful. In Afterland it's because a pandemic wipes out almost all men. Women get the flu, men get the flu then prostate cancer. Our main protagonist is Cole, mother of one of the very few immune males, her 13 year old son Miles. They're from South Africa, but were in the US when the pandemic happened, and are now interred because males are precious and must be protected at all costs. But Cole's sister Billie helps them break out, for altruistic reasons, because she wants to sell first Miles' sperm, and later Miles himself, to a woman buyer. What we get from that point on is a road trip through the USA, as they're trying to reach the coast to flee back home to South Africa, while being hunted down by Billie, the FBI, hiding amongst a religious cult group.

I enjoyed it quite a bit. Compared to The Power, I think this was better-written. I was annoyed by Miles but I think he was portrayed as annoying as a 13 year old teenager can be, especially considering he's like the last of his kind.

It was very good, but not super amazing, fwiw.

The timing is a bit ironic, a plague book being released just as COVID19 was becoming a household word.

The central plot device is a plague that kills almost all y-chromosome bearers. This leaves plenty of room for sly observations on human nature.

The surviving boy (Miles) spends much of the book disguised as a girl. This is a purely practical thing, I don't think people looking for a trans-kid coming of age story will find it here. On the other hand I do think it looks at coming of age issues related to sexuality and (fluidity-of) gender in a respectful and authentic way.

The main villain/anti-hero is Miles' aunt Billy who is charismatic and funny but narcissistic to the level of being dangerous to herself and others. She seemed like a not-so-heavily-veiled dig at the "heroic-entrepreneur", but I might just be projecting my own biases.

Miles' mother Cole is smart enough to make the snappy dialog believable, but also fallible, so that her struggles are not just with the US government and your usual assortment of post-apocalyptic feral road trip characters, but also with herself.

There are certainly a few twists in the plot, but for me the main dramatic tension was from the reader being a bit ahead of the characters, and knowing their story arcs are headed for trouble, separately and together.

The recently-read-by-me book it most resembles is Station 11. I'm not sure which one is better, they have a rather different feel to them. Station 11 envisions a post-technological future, while Afterland is more or less our a current world, where (almost) all of the villains and heroes happen to be (cis) women. If pressed, I would say that Afterland is more fun, while Station 11 is more beautiful.

I have enjoyed Lauren Beukes' books very much in the past. She is creative, insightful, and her writing style is wonderful. I especially liked Broken Monsters (so good at dialogue) and Zoo City (so ... weird, in a good way). This one was a bit less of a "wow" book for me, which may be partly due to its landing during a pandemic. This may have made me more critical of, or less receptive to a plotline based on a devastating pandemic virus (this one an oncovirus rather than a coronavirus, which has at least educated me about the existence of virally-caused cancers). But beyond that I am deeply annoyed by dystopian futures that assume the worst of people and this story seems to follow that narrative, when in fact the present moment (police violence, protests, mutual aid, more police violence) suggests we'd be fine in a crisis if we were just allowed to get on with it. In this case the government is more competent than I believe it would be and the people are less tolerant and cooperative than I believe they are. The other disappointment for me was that the promise of the central concept - what if most men were gone from the population? - just didn't get much play, really, apart from some very screwed up religious nuts who have built an order of penitents because they ... they wish there were men around to tell them what to do? Interesting but I didn't really get it, and that could be my fault. I did like the interplay between the sisters (the bad one has the best lines) and the confusing approach of puberty for a boy who has to pretend to be a girl. But overall - I should try not to have such enormous expectations, perhaps. A good read, but disappointing.