Book Review - "Daughters of the North" by Sarah Hall

When a natural disaster devastated her hometown, shredded the infrastructure that held her community together, and left her and others with nowhere to live, British author Sarah Hall did more than pick up the pieces.

She envisioned how something like this - on a widespread scale - could turn a prosperous nation into a police state, ruled by a shadowy Authority that controlled everything from food distribution to female reproduction.

If this description brings to mind Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, you're not the only one making that comparison. But Hall's novel should not be seen as a retread of Atwood's work. It's different in one distinct way: There's not a handmaid to be found among the title characters of Daughters of the North. With few exceptions, they are unyieldingly hardcore and unnervingly savage when push comes to shove. Think Linda Hamilton in The Terminator. If that's going back too far for you, think TV reality show Survivor with an all-female cast - lean, mean, trained to win immunity and take no prisoners.

Although we don't meet them until well into the book, these daughters of the north are the residents of Carhullan, a women-only community rumored to lie in the mountains of the Lake District, a picturesque yet isolated region made famous by the British Romantic poets and Beatrix Potter among others.

Before the breakdown of society, Carhullan was known for its vegetables and dairy goods, brought to the local farmers market by spare, sinewy women dressed in yellow tunics.

But after the Authority takes control and herds the population into Official areas where hard work and deprivation become routine - and the only food available is canned and shipped from overseas - the community and its women take on mythic proportions to the narrator of the novel, who dreams of escaping the Authority and finding this female-only Shangri-La.

Though the themes in this novel may lead booksellers to shelve it among science fiction or speculative fiction, this is literary fiction at its finest. Sarah Hall can write with a capital W, and Daughters of the North delivers descriptions of desolate windswept landscapes more vivid than picture postcards, and one-two-punch passages that will make your stomach curl in disgust.

It's well crafted, thoughtfully structured, and the back story of Carhullan and the narrator (who calls herself Sister) unfold carefully like a perfect origami bird unmaking itself before our eyes.

It's important to note that the novel is graphic in many places, with crude language throughout. Both are necessary to the development of the story, and the images they create have a lingering unease to them.

In an interview, Hall specifically stated that she had no interest in writing a book for women who obsess about the fat on their thighs.

In short, this is not chick lit for the easy-readers book club that hearts Oprah's picks.

But it is a story by a gifted writer that examines what price we will pay for freedom and self-determination, and how women are capable of bonding by way of blood, guts and glory - same as men have for generations - to form a sisterhood resolute enough to execute the ultimate sacrifice.

Daughters of the North
by Sarah Hall
Paperback, 220pp. ISBN: 0-06-143036-7
Harper Perennial April 2008