the natural way of things by charlotte wood

There’s the woman raped by a gang of men and left for dead on the cruise ship the woman who accused a well-known CEO of sexual harassment the woman who was raped by a football team. The Natural Way of Things is fiction, but it draws quite explicitly on a number of recent and well-known incidents where women were publicly excoriated, shamed or even killed for their sexual transgressions. But we have never before had a book like this, that places women who have been abused and shamed for their sexual conduct into a form of detention that is both physical and, we soon learn, psychological. More recently, we have had Helen Garner’s The First Stone (Pan Macmillan, 1995) Anna Krien’s Night Games (Black Inc., 2013), to name just two standout books that try to unravel contested stories of sexual misadventure. We have ‘The Drover’s Wife’ by Henry Lawson and ‘The Chosen Vessel’ by Barbara Baynton depicting the terrors of women alone in the late nineteenth-century bush. We have books about prisons and prisoners, including a whole literature on convict women, those poor souls maligned as ‘damned whores’ by Lieutenant Ralph Clark of the First Fleet.

There is nothing like it in our literary past. It is not a place, or a literature, that we have encountered before. The women in Charlotte Wood’s powerful and distinctive novel are prisoners in an imaginative landscape that we know only as a remote location somewhere in inland Australia. Can this be happening? In twenty-first-century Australia? This is the world into which you step when you open The Natural Way of Things.

IT IS ALMOST impossible to believe: ten young women, all of them aged under twenty-five, held captive because of their past sexual transgressions.

The natural way of things by charlotte wood