THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 11LAUREN BEUKES’S fifth novel is a smartly
written thriller that opens with a satisfying
bang: a parent and child on the run after
escaping a government compound where
the young teenager has been quarantined
and forced to undergo a seemingly endless
series of tests. The parent is Cole. The kid
goes through most of the novel under the
alias of Mila. From that you could fairly as-
sume that it’s a father and daughter on the
lam, but Beukes — whose novel “The Shin-
ing Girls” dealt with a time-traveling serial
killer — is all about turning assumptions
and expectations upside down. Cole is ac-
tually Nicole, and Mila, her 13-year-old
hostage to fortune, is actually Miles, one of
the few males left after Manfall has taken
99 percent of those carrying the Y chromo-
some. This is because of a pandemic — yes,
that again — known as the human culgoa
virus, or H.C.V.
The flap copy on my advance edition de-
clares that “Afterland” is a “high-concept
feminist thriller that Lauren Beukes fans
have been waiting for.” It is a thriller, I
grant you that, and feminist in the sense
that most of the men have been erased by a
flu virus that develops into prostate can-
cer, but Beukes is too wise and story-ori-
ented to wham away at ideas that have
been thoroughly explored, sometimes at
tedious length, on cable news and social
media. She lets her tale do the talking, and
the results are quite splendid.
This is your basic neo-noir, coast-to-
coast chase novel, and Beukes, who is from
South Africa, sees America with the fresh
eyes of an outsider. There are desert vis-
tas, an overblown casino, a dangerously
lonely woman with a shotgun and finally a
rundown Florida nightmare that’s still try-
ing to be Miami.
Cole and Miles/Mila are trying to get to
Florida, where they hope to find sea pas-
sage back to their home continent of Afri-
ca. There things may or may not be better
(Beukes doesn’t go into that). They are be-
ing chased by the Department of Men, a
kind of female Gestapo dedicated to a new
law called reprohibition that basically for-
bids women to get pregnant by the few
men still available to do the job. This might
seem like a shaky proposition in a world
close to becoming one sex only, but Beukes
almost makes it sensible. Anthony Fauci
isn’t quoted here — presumably the novel
went to press too soon — but he could have
been; essentially what the Department of
Men is up to is flattening the curve. Or try-
ing to.
Reprohibition offers Beukes the chance
to incorporate all sorts of interesting (and
often amusing) possibilities into her fic-
tion, although it would be wrong to call any
of them social commentary. The manless
world Beukes imagines is seen from the
corner of the eye and enriches the story
without taking it over. Bogus baby bumps
are in vogue; strip clubs feature women
with cosmetic beard stubble and fake phal-
luses; there is a thriving black market in
semen, which is referred to as “white gold.”
Flattening the curve may sound good, but
women still want to get pregnant even
though their infant boys may die. As, I sup-
pose, people still want to crowd beaches
and amusement parks even though they
understand they may be spreading the co-
ronavirus, or catching it and taking it home
to the grandparents.
If it were just the no-faces of the Depart-
ment of Men after Cole and Mila, this
might be a standard science fiction novel
instead of the standout that it is. Beukes
ups the ante by making it personal. Coleand Mila are also being hunted by Cole’s
sister, Billie (as in much current fiction, all
the major female characters in “Afterland”
seem to have macho names). Wilhelmina
Brady is the book’s most memorable char-
acter: self-involved, self-pitying, self-de-
luding and relentless. She isn’t just deter-
mined to get Miles and pass him on to a
rich woman for mucho megabucks; she’s
hurt and angry at her sister for not under-
standing that what Billie wants is best,
even if it means Miles will be separated
from his mom and find himself the pris-
oner of someone far worse than the De-
partment of Men.
Cole has the temerity to clonk Billie on
the head with a tire iron instead of turning
her son over. But neither a fractured skull
nor impromptu surgery with a hand drill
can stop this harpy. “Your sister’s impossi-
ble to kill,” Cole’s late husband once told
her. “After the apocalypse, it’ll just be Billie
and Keith Richards roaming the world
taming cockroaches.” Well, Keith is gone
(so, it turns out, are Jake Gyllenhaal andthe Rock), but Billie perseveres in her
dogged pursuit of her sister and nephew.
Beukes really lights it up when she’s writ-
ing about this bad sister. At one point,
while cleaning up blood in the back seat of
a stolen car, Billie muses, “This is why you
pony up for leather seats.”
Along the way — one jump ahead of Bil-
lie and her accompanying gun-thugettes
until the very end — Cole and Mila fall in
with the Sisters of All Sorrows, a bunch of
wannabe nuns who feel sure that if they
apologize enough, the men will come back.
They reminded me of the Guilty Remnant
in Tom Perrotta’s “The Leftovers,” only
without the cigarettes.
Miles, on the edge of puberty and able to
pass as a girl with the right clothes and a
little makeup, becomes enraptured with
the Sisters and runs away from Cole at a
crucial moment, hoping to meet the sect’s
leader, Mother Inferior (no one can say
Beukes lacks a sense of humor). It’s typical
teen rebellion, but under the circum-
stances all too apt to be deadly.
Will readers want a pandemic novel at
this fraught moment in American life?
Maybe they will. Make that probably. Be-
cause our current situation looks prettygood compared with a world where young
boys have been declared a natural re-
source and sperm bootlegging means im-
prisonment. There’s an interlude between
Parts 1 and 2 of the story I could have done
without because it stops the action cold
with a lot of geeky science hoo-ha, but one
paragraph does add some needed perspec-
tive (and hope) to where we are now. Ac-
cording to Beukes, AIDS killed 39 million
globally, and the Spanish flu may have tak-
en out 50 million. Covid-19 hasn’t brought
us even close to the manpocalypse of
which Beukes writes with such verve and
mordant wit. How can you not fall in love
with a book where the P.P.E.-wearing sci-
entists tasked with discovering a vaccine
are called plague-o-nauts and there’s a
government bureau dealing with PMdFs,
or Previously Male-dominated Fields?
A few years ago, my son and I wrote a
novel called “Sleeping Beauties,” which ex-
amined the other side of the situation
Beukes envisions. In ours, all the women
fall asleep and grow fairy-tale cocoons,
leaving the men to carry on. It doesn’t turn
out well. Things are better in Beukes’s
story; even with 99 percent of the men
gone, society staggers on, complete with
government, nightlife, shopping — and a
booming trade in fake baby bumps. Think
of a world where Donald Trump and Ted
Cruz have gone to their reward, but Ruth
Bader Ginsburg keeps on trucking. That
doesn’t sound so bad, does it? 0A Matter of Miles
In this coast-to-coast chase novel, a mother and son are on the run after a pandemic.
By STEPHEN KING
AFTERLAND
By Lauren Beukes
416 pp. Mulholland Books. $28.
THE HEADS OF STATEThere are desert vistas, an
overblown casino, a dangerously
lonely woman with a shotgun.STEPHEN KING’Smost recent book, “Let It
Bleed,” is a collection of four novellas.