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Kit Whitfield's first novel BAREBACK can be best classified as police procedural noir, with an appropriately hard-boiled heroine, that happens to take place in a dystopian alternate universe in which most people are werewolves and the few unfortunates who aren't are conscripted at 18 into policing their full-moon rampages. Of course, most of the 'lycanthropes' don't go out on full-moon-nights: they lock themselves in shelters to avoid damaging the outside world and the vulnerable 'anmorphic' minority -- 'barebacks', as the lyco epithet goes. When 'luning', lycos become sadistic pure ids, and when their humanity returns, they mostly can't remember what they did the night before. That is why it is so crucial for the anmorphic underclass to 'dogcatch', prosecute, and punish those who break the curfew. May 'Lola' Galley, said hardboiled protagonist, is a 28-year-old bareback who has seen and been through nearly every horror that this weird world can throw at her, and has the scars to prove it. Some of those scars are shockingly visible, and others are revealed only as Whitfield's mesmerising narrative progresses. When a lyco on the prowl rips the right hand off one of Lola's colleagues, and the victim is subsequently murdered, she starts investigating not only suspects, but also all the endlessly cycling effects of a society built on the stipulation that nobody is responsible for their most beastly actions. BAREBACK reminded me a great deal of two dystopian tales: Aldous Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD and Margaret Atwood's THE HANDMAID'S TALE. There's a question about the ethics of 'biology is destiny' in a society with rigid class differences, as in BRAVE NEW WORLD, and both Whitfield and Atwood's dystopias are ones in which the oppressors' self-justification is matched only by the apathy of most of the oppressed, which is in turn predicated on the 'biology is destiny' diktat. At the same time, BAREBACK's world is slightly less fully or logically realised than that of THE HANDMAID'S TALE. For one night in every 28, the lycos allow the physically vulnerable, economically oppressed, and socially despised barebacks to lock them up and shoot them if they remain at large. Why, then, do the non-lycos agree to open the shelters and cages in the morning? Wouldn't a population that has been oppressed, mauled, and killed for hundreds of years eventually stage a revolution, particularly when they have a monthly opportunity? Whitfield offers a few reasons why they wouldn't: some lycos have non-lyco children and spouses, whom they love; and a medieval 'Inquisition', the rote study of which has raised everybody's sensitivity, at least in theory. But I had further nagging questions. Lola mentions an earthquake warning and a war: events that normally wreck infrastructure. What happens when war or nature destroys the shelters -- do the lycos massacre the non-lycos? What about nomadic societies -- do lycanthropic Bedouins need cast-iron tents as lock-ups? And why do they demand to be locked up anyway? When luning, they attack property and non-lycos, but never other lycos, as far as Whitfield reveals. Still, this is a rare tale, well worth reading. Whitfield's prose is gorgeous. Lola is a truly memorable character; even a haunting one. Her romance with the lyco social worker Paul, who finds Lola's lunar scars horrifying but wouldn't give up the freedom of 'luning' for the world, is a fascinating study in self-contradiction and probably more common than I hope. Chases through lune-transformed landscapes that would terrify Ann Radcliffe alternate with witty, believable bureaucratic struggles and empathetic tracing of Lola's attempts to trust and love in a society that has given her no reason to do so. Whitfield is a promising writer, and a recent graduate of the prestigious Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia. I remember reading some time ago, in a national newspaper, a book reviewer's generalisation that UEA MA graduates tend to write in a common style. Whitfield definitely proves this wrong: she is a daring and original storyteller. Even though she didn't invent the elements of her story, they are put together in wonderfully new and surprising ways. I look forward to reading her next novel.
Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, August 2006
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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