The Times - UK (2022-05-28)

18 saturday review Saturday May 28 2022 | the times

ate the fears of those who call them subhu-

man or disease-carriers (a wearying series

of coronavirus pandemics have hit hard).

As the red people try to find a place among

the townsfolk, the threat from a local far-

right group looms and a climactic mid-

summer festival doesn’t go as expected.

Maggie Gee writes with brio and a spiky

humour, combining her abiding interest in

climate change and her new fascination

with the latest science about Neanderthals

with delightfully drawn characters.

Perfect by Sally Emerson

Quadrant, 287pp; £8.99

There’s a brisk, no-

nonsense style to the novel-

ist Sally Emerson’s first col-

lection of short stories that

makes the supernatural ele-

ments in her tales especially

disconcerting. A mysterious chemist pre-

scribes herbal supplements that send a

town’s women into a lather of lust. A young

registrar finds death certificates bearing

future dates in her in-tray and has to decide

whether to help the strangers in Death’s

sights. Two students who take up the offer

of cheap lodgings in London find that their

live-in landlady has some distinctly strange

plans for them. Set against the oddity,

there’s a tug of sadness as protagonists deal

with difficult lives, but Emerson guides

most of them to happy endings.

Taddeo’s protagonists are often driven to

sour distraction by how nothing meets their

expectations, torturing themselves by

trawling Facebook pages and wishing death

on everyone when things inevitably go

awry. They desperately spout brand names

and follow trends as if they were the love

children of Carrie Bradshaw and Patrick

Bateman. Although she can be funny, Tad-

deo, left, mainly goes for full-throttle outra-

geousness, her similes as manic as her tell-

it-like-it-is heroines. “The more a man

didn’t want her, the more it made her vagina

tingle,” we’re told about the hilariously de-

ranged cougar Joan. “It was like a fish that

tried to panfry itself.” Well, you can’t say you

saw that one coming.

We Had to Remove This

Post by Hanna Bervoets,

trans Emma Rault

Picador, 134pp; £12.99

Who would want to work as

a social media moderator?

The grim daily diet of hor-

rific images and unbridled

hate that you’re forced to assess would be

bad enough, but in Hanna Bervoets’s acid-

dipped novella (which lists its research

sources at the end) the deplorable working

conditions seem almost designed to pitch

people over the edge. The story is framed

as a confession. Kayleigh took a job evalu-

ating content for an unnamed social media

platform because she needed the money.

She and her fellow new hires think they

can stay in control, but the company wants

97 per cent accuracy from its moderators

even though they are expected to deal with

at least 500 tickets a day and the guidelines

keep changing.

Drink and drugs become coping mecha-

nisms, but the bad dreams don’t go away;

making jokes about the awful stuff they see

starts to warp into something more sinis-

ter. As they lose their moral compasses,

things go decidedly awry for the desensi-

tised Kayleigh and her traumatised col-

league and girlfriend, Sigrid. It’s a glimpse

of the foetid underbelly of the internet and

a sobering consideration of who is decid-

ing what we see, and at what cost.

The Red Children

by Maggie Gee

Telegram, 256pp; £14.99

The first “red people”

appear on the quay in a

near-future Ramsgate,

naked and befuddled. As

more and more appear the

locals are unnerved — these new arrivals

are bigger than average people and speak

a language no one understands. They

seem to be fleeing the rising heat in the

south of Europe and leave strange, hash-

tag-like symbols on walls. Their red-

haired leader, the Professor, tries to allevi-

d

T b T T a n n m

W P t P W a T r

hate thatyou’r

Ghost Lover by Lisa

Taddeo Bloomsbury,

240pp; £16.99

Lisa Taddeo caused a sen-

sation with Three Women, a

delve into the intimate

details of real women’s sex

lives. Her debut novel,

Animal, veered into Grand Guignol ex-

cess; Ghost Lover continues that trajec-

tory with gleeful abandon. These nine

stories are deliberately over-the-top

tales of women searching for, and gen-

erally failing to find, fulfilment — good

men are markedly thin on the ground.

Grace, who notes sadly that “the 50-

plus never-marrieds” are regarded as

“zombies who ate foul cheese and

smelled of crying”, thinks she has hit pay

dirt when she’s accepted on an exclusive

dating app. No such luck. Hard-up Jane is

thrilled when she hooks a movie star. Not

so fast. Noni believes that the man she has

been obsessed with for decades has finally

acknowledged her special place in his life.

His second wife knows better.

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All men are sent to Hell — and serve

’em right! This dystopian tale is

utterly dimwitted, says Jessa Crispin

M

en! Am I right, ladies?

They’re always there, with

their hair, and their faces,

and their geopolitical grand-

standing, despite the loom-

ing threat of nuclear annihilation. Always

climbing trees and peeing on things and

creating a corporate culture that allows for

the nihilistic degradation of our environ-

ment. And you know, don’t you, that if they

get lost while driving they are not going to

stop to ask for directions!

There, I just saved you the excruciating

experience of reading Sandra Newman’s

The Men, the most ill-conceived and badly

executed novel of the year, if our God is a

merciful one.

In Newman’s telling, one day all the men

disappear. Having ruined the world with

capitalism and patriarchy, they finally get

what they deserve (as a middle-aged

woman who just lost two sons and a hus-

band sums it up: “All the wars, the pollution,

the rapes... and they even had to piss on

train platforms!”) and they all go to Hell. Or

something that seems an awful lot

like Hell, being that the men are starved,

tortured and torn to pieces while surround-

ed by giant Boschian animals, all while live

streamed on a website as if the demon

realm is just another social media platform

(the only idea in this novel I can get behind).

Newman never gets around to figuring

out whether it’s the doing of demons or

aliens, or if this is just a glitch in a multi-

verse simulation, or if a bunch of women

got together and did a big magical spell

after disappointing dates with guys who

lied about their height on their Tinder

profiles. Whatever. The men are being

punished, which is what they deserve.

Because they are men. Even the babies

who also went to Hell, they deserve it.

Because they will eventually turn into

men. Who deserve to be punished.

This is the kind of circular logic

that drives The Men, and you think surely

not, surely we’re not just going to spin

endlessly around this one dumb idea until

we puke from dizziness, but we are and

we do.

What do the women left behind end up

doing? They clean up the patriarchy’s

mess. The Men juggles a motley group of

women who lost husbands, sons, friends

and brothers, but the action of the novel is

mostly driven by our narrator Jane, who

committed some sex crimes but it was

because a man forced her to and not her

responsibility. Not much happens other

than women remembering the men they

lost, both the ones they loved and the

ones who oppressed them, which is a

funny irony. A book that could be about

how women would build a different world

becomes a rumination on all the bad

things men have done.

Things happen, but we don’t see much of

it — we’re told via little political updates

and social media posts. Women negotiate

world peace, they fairly redistribute food

and housing, and they enjoy each other’s

company. Jane has just lost her husband

and her five-year-old son, and even she

thinks the world is better without the male

half of the population. “I was struck by how

profoundly a scene was changed by the

removal of the masculine element... A

world of lambs with no wolves.”

“The world would get better if only this

one specific demographic could be eradi-

cated from the face of the Earth” is an ex-

tremely weird thought to have, and it’s

even weirder not only to write it down

but to prattle on about it for a couple of

hundred pages. I guess we’re just lucky

Newman decided to use “men” and not

“the Jews” or whatever.

Newman has been a talented writer with

many decent books to her name, the kind

of books you enjoy but forget the moment

you finish them and when you come across

the title again you struggle to remember if

you’ve already read it. But she is not a

thoughtful writer and she stumbles over

stereotypes and clichés.

Here, she doesn’t just trip over the

stereotype of men bad/women good, she

builds a house with it as her foundation.

She only makes it worse by trying to

wokeify the text, sprinkling in mentions of

trans and nonbinary people in the clumsi-

est way possible as if she remembered

in the final draft that trans people existed

and had to be accounted for in her scheme

of damnation.

There are plenty of feminist utopia and

dystopia novels that do a better job of im-

agining a world missing half of its popula-

tion. And if, as an author, you find yourself

getting intellectually lapped by the comic

book series Y: The Last Man and the Aveng-

ers movie franchise, it might be time to

admit you are out of your depth. What

would it be like to live in a world without

men? Sadly, The Men gives us no answers.

Instead, it solves a different riddle: how do

you create a thought experiment without

any thinking?

no man’s land Sandra Newman’s new novel stumbles over stereotypes and clichés

Newman tries

to wokeify

the story,

clumsily

sprinkling in

mentions of

trans people

The Men

by Sandra Newman

Granta, 272pp; £14.99

books

Is this the worst novel of the year?

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