Short Book Review: A Post-Apocalyptic Midwife

The Book of the Unnamed Midwife (The Road to Nowhere, Book 1) by Meg Elison, 47North. Just as I finished reading this book, I listened to a radio program on the role of dystopic literature in today’s political landscape. The books referenced were generally those so well known they had been made into films ( The Hunger Games, Divergence, The Handmaid’s Tale). The context was one of social commentary and political warning. Meg Elison’s Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel, although depicting a future as grim as the others, focuses instead of a human story. There’s no explanation for the plague that wipes out most of humankind, or why most men turn into rapists bent on enslaving women; that’s not the heart of the story. Via alternating journal entries and narrative sections, an unnamed woman – a nurse midwife working in a hospital -- chronicles her own personal journey through a landscape of dead people and dying cities, caught between the desolation of being utterly alone and the peril posed by the few other survivors. As she survives one crisis after another, she gains in wisdom and insight. No matter how lonely she is, she refuses to sacrifice her hard-won independence – both of body and of spirit. The writing is clear and lucid, its simplicity a perfect vehicle for the power of the emotional arc. In the end, the seeds of trust and kindness only partly glimpsed at the beginning of her harrowing tale come to fruition in a thoroughly satisfying way.