I got to the end of the book and started right back in at the beginning, reading it a second time through with notebook at hand, jotting down images and words, thoughts, ideas. The Natural Way of Things may leave you with questions.
It is most definitely bleak, sometimes almost devastatingly so. Madness permeates it, and it’s hard to know just who is mad and who sane, what is real and what imagined. It’s dense with love, friendship and hatred and it simultaneously explores community and separation, the human urges both to band together and to stand apart and above. It’s filled with animals-birds, insects, snakes, lizards, kangaroos, a horse (perhaps), a fish-and with both noises and silence. Lush despite its harsh setting, the book inundates the senses with sounds and imagery and emotion. This is a deep, rich novel that deserves to be read. What brought these ten women together is that each was at the center of a sex scandal that threatened some sort of entrenched system or powerful man: a gang rape by footballers, an extramarital affair with a government official, a teen-age girl sexually abused by a cardinal. Together they find themselves struggling to survive in a dystopian prison camp “managed”-through a combination of violence, threats and fear-by three untrained and ill-equipped people perhaps no older than themselves. As we soon learn, they are two of ten young women who have been taken prisoner either through trickery or against their will, and forced into seemingly purposeless labor in what we can only hope is an extralegal operation-because the alternative is too horrible and unholy to fathom. Thus are Yolanda Kovacs and Verla Learmont thrown together at the start of a months-long imprisonment in the opening pages of Charlotte Wood’s marvelous novel The Natural Way of Things.
The door closes, and the two are together, confused and frightened. She is as alone as the first, until a door opens and the other woman enters this room. In an adjacent room sits another young woman, equally bewildered as to her whereabouts, certain only that she has been drugged, struggling to remember the events that brought her to an unfamiliar place. She assumes she is in a mental asylum-we’ve no idea yet as to why-and doesn’t know if she is mad. A young woman awakens in a room she doesn’t recognize, wearing clothing she’s never seen, with no idea where she is other than the middle of nowhere.
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