A Book Review and a Musing on Being Sensible and Moral

This weekend, I'd planned to post on the topic of how choosing what to read has changed for me over time. Then I unexpectedly chose to read something that I'd intended to put off for later. I was struck so much by what I'd read that I decided to put a rambling review of it here, as well as touch on the ideas of fear, logic, morality, and ethics in thinking about our enemies.

I had some hesitation when first considering whether to read Kari Aguila’s Women's Work. The blurb triggered unbidden memory snippets of the Rifftrax of Wicker Man. But perhaps this was because I’d just come across a rash of movies and books where good-hearted innocent survivors had to join together to kill astounding numbers of their enemy in cold-blooded ways. Why? Well because, silly: they were hopelessly irredeemably BAD people or zombies or whatever. Killing them without question or remorse is the only thing a sensible moral person could do.

One would be hard pressed to find any saga, war story, or even any grassroots rising of “normal people who work together to save themselves from really horrific enemies" where actions didn’t ultimately boil down to that reasoning. If popular culture has taught me anything, it's that normal ideas of fairness and compassion must logically be set aside based upon how bad your group perceives the enemy COULD be, not in more objective terms, e.g. actual body counts or whether the person you're about to kill had anything to do with an atrocity that spurred you to act. (No wait, there’s one: I just saw the campy zombie teenage love story, Warm Bodies. It does more to bring up the moral struggle of defense vs decency than anything I’ve seen in years. Admittedly though, other than Sean of the Dead, I’m not much for zombie movies.)

I like to think of myself as sensible and moral, in equal amounts. So at the enthusiastic urging of an unseen GoodReads colleague, not to mention the fact that I’d already bought it, I looked through Women’s Work to see if I should adjust its position in my TBR queue. That was my morally sensible undoing. Perhaps I was just being nonsensible (yes, spellcheck, I know you don’t recognize that word; I’ve just made it up), but I felt drawn to it. It had been a risk buying it in the first place. I generally don’t buy anything unless I can read an excerpt before. But I’d read a bit of Kari Aguila’s blogs and she seemed thoughtful, well-balanced, and not at all like someone advocating mass murder for sensible and moral reasons. I was pretty much snowed in anyway and was bouncing between several books to keep the cabin fever at bay. So I read a little. And then I read a little more. And then I was hooked.

I read it before bed, and the first thing upon waking up. I read it between bouts of snow-shoveling and deliberately hid my Nook from myself whenever I needed to get real work done. I read it before going out for a nice Valentine’s Day dinner with my husband and tried not to worry him overmuch with the plot and its premise.

Why did I like it so much? I’m not sure, but I think it was because Kate, the protagonist, and her children and those in the neighborhood who’ve first endured a gender-divided police state rivaling The Handmaid's Tale, and then survived missile attacks from a horrifying war, are human, likeable, and most importantly, capable of looking beyond their circumstances and their fears to make authentically sensible and moral decisions.

In Women’s Work, adult men have been pretty much wiped out. We learn how and why as we read along, the backstory emerging in bits and glimpses as it deftly emerges in just the right way and in just the right places before quietly receding to let the flow of the story go forward. Beloved husbands, sons, brothers, and fathers were literally dragged off to war or killed in resisting it. A few went into hiding or were too young, but it was pockets of women who emerged when it was all over. We never learn exactly what that particular war was about, but it doesn’t really matter. As it is with most victims of catastrophic wars, it really had nothing to do with them and their day to day lives other than to rob them of family and a hopeful future.

Kate’s new civilization, instituted in the aftermath of the war, emphasizes seven Habits of Humanity (kindness, sharing, hard work, humility, control, patience, and moderation) that were to replace the scriptural seven deadly sins (anger, greed, laziness, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony), which were felt to be at the root of all violence and war. One can’t argue with the reasoning, but it’s notable what’s missing in the seven Habits: compassion, mercy, justice, forgiveness and reconciliation, an unbiased thirst for truth and knowledge, and above all, love in every sense of the word. The seven deadly sins are appropriately warned about in the new school, but the seven virtues from traditional catechism class have been forgotten. (I suppose virtues like hope, justice, and love are nearly always casualties of war, and centuries of learning them hasn’t helped us much in preventing the deadlies from getting the upper hand in the first place. So I guess there was a reason they were no longer taught.) Most all civilizations, religions, and cultures extol the same Habits that the women’s world embraced in one form or another, and have struggled with keeping the deadly sins from getting out of hand. And like the women’s world, most all come up short in realizing that the enemy that they thought they’d conquered was being reborn in themselves.

There are some males in the new civilization: babies and young boys mainly, as well as a few wounded soldiers or old men kept out of the public eye as well as the decision-making process. As rumors spread between the villages about gangs of unrepentant men raiding houses, raping and murdering inhabitants, and kidnapping children, young men coming of age are subjected to Jim Crow kinds of laws. These laws and social repercussions to women family members advocating for equality make it unsafe for men to be out much. An unaccompanied adult male with no one to vouch for him is seen as dangerous and subject to vigilantism and mob violence (though not referred to as that). Surviving men are given kitchen and childrearing duties and discouraged from speaking in public.

This is the world where the book begins and it’s why Kate and her children are so terrified when a strange male shows up at the doorstep of her farm. Its location is far from the town and surrounded by woods. They’re very much alone and have reasons to fear if a raider comes by. But Kate has good memories of a beloved husband, who didn’t survive his military conscription, and she has a son who is already having to be restricted in what he can do. Kate is also wrestling with uneasy feelings whenever she passes the grave of a stranger that her friends in the village have killed not too long before in the sincere belief that it was self-defense.

The heart of the book is not just how Kate must balance her fears for herself, her children, and the town at large against her remaining sense of compassion for her fellow man. And it’s not just a potential “love conquers all story” for those who have reason to give up on the notion of romantic love entirely. It’s about how the interplay of fear and trust in a culture shapes individuals, and how the courage to live out the forgotten catechetical virtues of individuals can shape their culture in return.

Kate knows she’s potentially putting lives on the line no matter what she does. If she does not accurately judge whether Michael is truthful about who he is and where he came from, she risks her children's lives. If she’s not careful about whom she consults or how she does it, she risks Michael’s life and perhaps ultimately, her son's future. None of these risks and fears are glossed over and none are overplayed.

If I have one criticism at all of this book, it’s the too sudden shift to an ending from the crisis point that the book has so carefully taken us to. I had the urge to send the author a message and ask her for the missing chapters that Barnes and Nobles had left out of the epub. I wanted to ask her how the codified fear and hysteria of the townswomen that she had done such a fine job of describing were simply dropped from the story in the dénouement. Yes, we have the general idea why, but call me an unromantic if you will: I’m not overly puzzled how people who love each other can surmount nearly impossible odds and forgive the seemingly unforgiveable. We’ve all seen, read, experienced or heard of it many times. I want to know how villages do it, especially villages of victims of such horrors. That’s much rarer and involves more psychic risk to each of them. But the details and hard work of that, I’m afraid, Aguila has left to our imaginations. (Maybe there’s a sequel?)