In an underground bunker, in an unknown location, silent and armed men guard a cage that is home to thirty-nine women and one young girl. A child with no name, no age and no memory of a past, if she has one, tries to survive in this minuscule world that fails to provide the one nourishing thing that makes us human: connection.
“I who no longer speak, because there is no one to hear me.”
How long the women have survived this world in which they only have each for company, we know as little as they seem to. No calendar, no window, no link to the outside world – if such a place still exists – to offer any sense of time and space. Occasionally, perfunctorily, the women change stories and memories of lives past but never enough for the girl to truly understand what life was like before. They regard her with suspicion, as the only insider to this place, the only who grew up in it, she is an outsider to them. She only has herself to keep her mind intact, can only use her meagre experience to abstract herself away.
Everything is forever the same, until one day it isn’t.
Confronted, for the first time, with an entirely new reality, more terrifying that anything she has yet had to endure and it seems that, as the only one with no past, with nothing but present, she is the only hope the other women have in the face of the greatest challenge yet: a future.
I will never not be impressed with some authors’ ability to put so much into so little words, and Jacqueline Harpman is one of them. This is a small novel, and still she manages to write so much history, such detailed characterisation, and so many fascinating thoughts on humanity in general and language in particular onto these pages. And those musings on language were definitely what impressed me most in this book, as all those underlined passages in my copy illustrate.
With sparse and careful prose, Harpman creates the most disquieting atmosphere, and the result is a novel that haunts you long after you finish reading it. This novel is deeply sad and yet conveys a sense of wonder at the world, that I always love to experience, be it in literature or outside it. I Who Have Never Known Men is a dystopia, but a deeply introspective one and that is were it shines. The gripes I had with the text were related to the world building. I don’t mind not getting all the answers I want, if fact I think it’s a very effective tool. But the explanations I felt the author wanted me to consider often seemed implausible to me and I couldn’t trust that Harpman knew what was going on in this world.
Maybe that doesn’t matter. But it disturbed my reading. It did not, however, disturb my overall assessment of this novel, which I found compelling, thought-provoking, and lingering.
“But human beings need to speak, otherwise they lose their humanity, as I’ve realised these past few years.”
This edition by Vintage, 2019
First published 1995