The Carhullan Army

Britain is in a bad way.

Flooding, fuel shortages and overseas military commitments have taken their toll on the environment and the economy. Most of the population has been corralled into the cities; women have contraceptive copper coils inserted into them, and, humiliatingly, have to submit to random physical inspections to check that they have not removed them; food is rationed and restricted to overly salted or sweetened tinned food donated by the United States.

The Authority rules most of the country, restricting the movement of the populace and marking down as Unofficial any citizens who choose to live beyond their boundaries. One group of women in northern England has done just that, removing themselves from the administrative centre of Rith to set up a self-sufficient community on the farm of Carhullan, perched high in the remote wind-blasted fells.

The narrator of the novel, known simply as Sister, decides to leave her drab existence in Rith. Her carefully hoarded newspaper clippings about the Carhullan commune and its charismatic leaders Jackie and Veronique inspire her to escape from the city in search of the women. Her welcome, when she finally arrives, is not the one she was expecting.

Anyone who has read Haweswater, Sarah Hall’s first novel, will know how beautifully she writes about the Cumbrian landscape. Here, her descriptions are more spare, but no less potent, the harsh and ragged terrain mirroring the women’s struggle for survival:

‘I had often thought of the landscape as I stood beside the conveyor at the factory; it was a place of beauty and escape. Now I stumbled across its gills and over its marshland, bending to meet the wind when it roared against me, and dragging myself up the scars by handfuls of heather and thorn bushes, by any firm hold. And still, I could not say it wasn’t beautiful.’

As Sister is drawn into the Carhullan way of life, she becomes aware of the women’s resilience, and their urgent desire to make the community work. Literally this is a matter of survival, but their need to be there goes deeper. Each woman has her own specific reason for leaving the Authority’s control, but on the farm they share a vision of a democratic society that is strong enough to absorb disagreements. Quite how far this tolerance stretches becomes apparent during Sister’s time at Carhullan.

Clearly this is a novel about women – the few male characters in the book play a subsidiary role – but Hall is not a proselytiser nor a polemicist. She does not describe her characters as masculine or feminine (although many of them have traits that could have been – stereotypically – described thus), nor has she created bland composites of male and female. Ultimately, the Carhullan women are definitely, vitally, female, but what makes them strong is their willpower, and their story is both full-blooded, compelling and real.