Gets under the skin

When She Woke

Hillary Jordan

Harper Collins, £12.99

Review: Liam Heylin

Abortion and religious fundamentalism clash in a dystopian, future Texas in Hillary Jordan’s new novel.

The hook for the reader — and prospective movie producer — is melachroming. Convicted criminals have the colour of their skin altered to match the crime they have committed.

Hannah Payne is genetically altered so that her skin colour is red. Her crime is that she has had an abortion. She has done so to protect the father of her child, an older, married preacher. Her actions are deemed more serious by virtue of her silence on the identity of the person who has carried out the abortion.

The book as a physical thing has its own wit with its red cover and scarlet red edging to the pages making it reminiscent of a Sunday missal.

The ideas at work in the story chime with the times we live in, not least the feverish religious opposition to abortion, the rise of fundamentalism, the crashing of economies, coupled with the growing desire to punish and imprison those who challenge mores.

Hilary Jordan is at times a little feverish herself in her desire to hit the panic buttons of the zeitgeist. For instance, when Hannah is serving the first part of her sentence she is not alone in a prison but there is also a live television feed in her cell turning her into instant reality TV. This becomes something that Jordan touches on but doesn’t develop.

Much more thoroughly played out is the idea of micro-chipping of prisoners in society taken to the nth degree so that they become chromed, bearing the colour of their crime for all to see, free to roam but visible for all to see and abuse. Her red body becomes a prison in itself.

Late in the story comes this reflection: “Melachroming all but the most violent and incorrigible convicts was not only more cost effective than imprisoning them, it was also more a deterrent against crime and a more humane means of punishment. So Hannah had been taught by her parents and teachers, and so she’d always believed. Even when they’d injected her, there hadn’t been a shred of doubt in her mind that she deserved her punishment. But now she found herself questioning the system’s fairness.”

Freighted with such ideas, the novel carries them pretty cleanly using a kind of voyage of discovery, road movie structure.

Presenting itself as a re-imagining of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter for modern times, Jordan’s storytelling itself is — for all the suggestion of contemporary edginess — very clean, efficient and traditional. But on its own terms the narrative is strong and the writing effective in bringing home a provocative debate from a social minefield.