In Rith, near the Lake District, there are marshall law conditions - after a recession, the Forward Party and wars, now the Authority rules. The main character ("Sister") leaves her husband Andrew (who she doesn't like any more - they met at college. He used to be rebellious, but he's given up) in the night to head for Carhullan and Jackie Nixon. There's a travel ban. She's been forced into birth control.
She's been tense because she's been hiding her dead father's rifle. She's carrying it now through the rain.
At Carhullan there's a sort of women's collective that started before the troubles. It's the highest farm in the country. It was rumoured to be a cult or a den of witches/lesbians. When she nears it she's taken prisoner, kept in isolation for 3 days. Gradually she integrates. She has an arm in a sling and she has her coil taken out. She's warned about illnesses and told that she'll have to eat meat. She realises that her old life is over. There are 64 of them, including a baby. Veronique, Jackie's partner (they met at Cambridge as pgrads), died 3 years before. She's told that "London's finished". She comesto realise that there are fewer victims in the group than she thought, and more misfits.
Sons leave when they reach puberty. Some men (including the husband of one of the women) live in a nearby hamlet. She visits, with a few of the women. Some have sex with the men. She gets excited and has sex with Shruti, one of the collective. They continue having sneaky sex.
Jackie organises security. There are a mock raids. We learn 3/4 into the novel that Veronique had cancer, refused to go to a hospital, and ended up in so much pain that she asked Jackie to shoot her. She did.
The king dies. Jackie hears that there'll be no successor and that within 18 months, all free land (including theirs) will be repossessed. The men move closer. Fighters (including the narrator but not Shruti) are trained up. The narrator and Shruti become "just friends". She spends the odd night with one of the men. Jackie secretly gives her Veronique's necklace.
After 1.5 years she returns to Rith with a little army. They plan to conquer the Authority'd castle HQ and win over the population. Carhullan had been evacuated, the people sneaked back into villages. The married woman there had never believed Jackie's news, and told the narrator that Jackie had been grooming her. The woman and her husband try to escape in the night. Jackie shoots them. Then there's "[Data Lost]". The final page or so is a statement saying that they held the town for 53 days before they were captured. Jackie died. They destroyed all official records for the North. "You will not find out who am I .... I am second in council to the Carhullen Army"
The chapters are subtitled "FILE ONE" etc, from a penal archive. 2 of them are partial or corrupted.
Other reviews
- Richard Lea
- shigekuni (A book meant and conceived to be a popular read, easy on the brain, presenting no hurdles, innovations or critical difficulties. And yet, there’s a spark of originality in it, of careful thought. It is this spark that makes it worth reading. ... Penrith which means “Red Hill” or rather, “Hill Red”, is shortened to just “Rith” ... The Carhullan Army contains a few sex scenes, which are almost all of them risible and cheesy instead of erotic and involving. The same applies to the book’s depictions of Carhullan’s revolutionary leader and her ideology. It is as if Hall decided that all the worst implications about femininity and the images and contexts of it in male-dominated prose were all correct and worth emulating and reproducing. The embrace of cheap clingy stereotype is the single worst part of the book and I can personally understand every reader who broke off reading the book after the first or second of these scenes, although it is certainly worth persevering. ... Even the ‘partially recovered’ chapters turn out to be a trick without real narrative consequences. Flashbacks help fill in all the necessary gaps, and what we don’t know, we don’t want or care to know. The effect is disappointing, yes, and deeply puzzling: why would the writer hint at complexities she clearly has never really attempted to include in the book? )
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