This is an unusual and original novel set in a climate ravaged Australia. The story follows two separate groups. First, narrated by Win, is a rundown circus troupe, all women, plus a tiger and a horse. On the side, Queenie, the matriarch performs ‘reclamations’ (abortions) for desperate women. One of the other women in the circus, Valentina is Russian and there’s these strange interludes about the history of clowns and communist humour. The other narrative line is narrated by ‘The Woman’. She accompanies a preacher who treats her rubbish and who wants to track down whoever is doing abortions. All civil society seems to have collapsed, and the treatment of women seems to have regressed to extreme misogyny.
It’s a strangely compelling read and I’m sure I’ll be thinking about it for a while.2024 netgalley8 s2 comments RebeccaAuthor 48 books730

Set in a near-future, post-climate catastrophe Australia where violence against women (wives, girlfriends, daughters, strangers) is commonplace, accepted and unchecked, "Hurdy Gurdy" is a vividly drawn road trip through a nightmare post-industrial landscape where the wreckage of society (shopping centres, shuttle programs, $400 exorcisms, automata) sits cheek by jowl with tent revival churches, floating dental practices, and a travelling circus of disparate women (who also dispense abortions and hair cuts to desperate women and "close shaves" to wife beaters, incestuous parents and rapists). In Ackland's hands, a hazy, blasted landscape, sad clowns in the Russian tradition, asteroid dust, lost astronauts, and humanity at its basest, are all entirely plausible things, woven together.

Told from two perspectives - that of 19-year-old Winnstay or "Win" and that of "The Woman", a nameless religious fanatic who is the coercively-controlled help meet of a maniacal, transient male preacher - the reader is inexorably drawn towards the devastating collision of two diametrically opposed causes (women helping women vs men who impregnate and terrorise women by any means possible).

You can't look away from the evocative writing:

About Valentina the sad Russian clown: "She reaches out and puts a hand on each person's shoulder and with that somehow she's gone inside them, she's made them feel something they didn't arrive with. I don't know how she does it, it's a kind of magic. What's the point of making people laugh if all you're doing is sending them back to their lives the same as before? she says. They need to be changed."

About the state of society: "For the rest of us, internet service is glitchy and sometimes they switch it off and this makes people angry because what can they do with their opinions then?"

And: "You see, the whole planet is sick and humanity is the disease."

On what passes as faith in the world of "Hurdy Gurdy": "... in the distance gather flocks of long-legged birds. They stand, seemingly without purpose. They could be feeding, they could be starving, and the question has to be will they lie down and die with grace when the end comes? This is my question for them and for myself."

"Hurdy Gurdy" was a challenging and memorable reading experience, worthy of persevering with to the very last, deeply unsettling scene where there are no fixed answers. If you reading on the edge of your seat, facing into the unexpected, "Hurdy Gurdy" is for you.aus-lit dystopia-near-future the-women2 s Jackie McMillan358 23

"We have to think of the women first. We have to help them. Men protect each other so we women have to do the same." I d the concept of Hurdy Gurdy more than the execution. I found it a bit of a dreary and confusing read in the first half of the book. Once you finally understood it is a story about a troupe of traveling circus performers who also performed abortions, including er... late abortions where they dispatch the odd child rapist or wife beater ("Queenie calls it a dispatch, a community service"), it started to flow better and get a bit of tension.

I assume the front of the book is deliberate blurry as it overlaps with Win coming to awareness of what she's assisting the circus matriarch Queenie to do in the "reclamations". The early chapters have a sing-song tone and a lack of certainty that I found hard to engage with. There are snippets that draw upon historical Australian responses to sexual violence: "It sits inside the woman, it has a mechanism built-in that shreds anything that goes in, it might be a finger or something else." These nuggets kept me reading, but in small doses: I took nearly two weeks to finish it.

Thanks to NetGalley & Allen & Unwin for sending me a copy to read. nina.reads.books529 21

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