Blue Ticket
By Sophie Mackintosh
Published by Penguin
ISBN-10: 0241986699, ISBN-13: 978-0241986691
Buy this book from Amazon UK
In the country where 'Blue Ticket' by Sophie Mackintosh is set, girls are selected for childbearing or not as soon as they have their first period. Most tickets doled out by the official machine are the eponymous blue, as received by the protagonist Calla. At fourteen years old she is immediately given a contraceptive implant and sent off on a life of compulsory childlessness and work.
Eighteen years later, Calla is no longer content with her choice. Driven by a secret, nameless dark feeling, she makes the fateful choice to remove her intrauterine device and try to get pregnant. The story then follows the path of a slow dystopian thriller as Calla tries to flee the system to another country where she can keep her baby.
Blue Ticket is notable for its detached but rather beautiful prose. Told from Calla's perspective, the society she lives in, and its rules, are sparsely described by her in dreamlike fragments and short statements. Characters are known by first names only or simply by initials. She is a rather coolly-detached character but we are privy to hints of her richer internal emotional life. This does create intrigue and incentive to keep reading and try to fill in the details.
And yet it also confuses through deliberate obfuscation. For instance, there is no reference to the history or politics that have generated these peculiar fertility laws. Girls are simply made to leave their homes immediately after receiving their tickets and told to walk until they find a city. The process of what happens thereafter is not explained. If a blue-ticket woman does illegally become pregnant, she is treated with disgust and violence by nearly everyone, regardless of gender or ticket colour.
'They’ll come for you,' Calla's doctor tells her after discovering her secret pregnancy. 'They' are the 'emissaries', but what do they do? Calla doesn't know, and so neither do we, so effectively we find out in real-time with the story. When the emissaries come to her door, they have already provided her with a survival kit, and give her a head-start on getting away. Again, why? And why doesn't Calla leave earlier? And why would they waste time and resources chasing her? But the author has not decided such questions or logic are relevant. Blue Ticket is a quiet horror story about what happens when women's fertility choices are decided for them, under very mysterious yet specific rules.
The book does not show a positive view of childlessness, however. There is little suggestion that blue-ticket women can lead fulfilling or positive lives beyond frequent drinking at bars and having casual sex. In fact, expectations for blue ticket life lie heavily on sexual availability. The first man Calla meets as a travelling girl takes her to a hotel for sex, which she appears to accept as a normal occurrence. Her fellow blue ticket work colleagues casually commiserate with each other if they are discarded for a white ticket woman; the usual expectation. In Calla's romantic relationships it's made clear she doesn't know how to develop healthy emotional connections.
Still, is it a critique of childlessness or of a patriarchal society? White-ticket girls cannot work and must prepare to become domestic housewives. The author may be counteracting the critique she makes of the lives of blue-ticket women by providing us briefly with one white-ticket character who vehemently does not want to be a mother and another who hints at the worries of motherhood and stress that may arise from unequal parenting. In this society, men are simply privileged. They don't have to receive fertility treatment, they can choose to begin families with white-ticket women at will, and fathers walking in public with their legal babies are liberally presented with small gifts from passing strangers. All the male characters are unlikeable. You might find yourself wishing for a more nuanced view of fertility and gender.
Calla's desire for a baby is portrayed as wholly instinctual. Despite her own lack of a mother, seeing literal anti-childbirth propaganda, despite not knowing anything about babies or raising children, she is simply driven to try. And despite the sparseness of details, the book really delivers its emotional punches. On that basis it is certainly a satisfying read.
Buy Blue Ticket from Amazon UK.
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