In those scenes, I Who Have Never Known Men becomes, much like Toni Morrison’s seminal novel Beloved, an unending, spiralling tale of suffering and disappointments a slow and dreary wind-down to an utterly empty and horrifying conclusion. Nothing holding you down, nothing enforcing the rules. You can not fight yourself out of a situation when the reality of it is, is that there is absolutely nothing to fight against. Instead, they stem from the horrifying reality of these women’s lives after the ‘ruling class’ have left them behind their aimless wanderings, their desire to find anything that resembles human civilisation (kind or otherwise) and their constant failure to do so, is where the growing terror creeps in.Īfter-all, at least you can fight back against tangible, physical monsters, human or otherwise. It is jarring, disquieting, and profoundly saddening, made only more so because the real horrors of the novel do not come from the petty, cruel actions of a particular group of people - whether that be a certain race, class, gender or governmental organisation. In fact, even compared to most older dystopias, the book is nothing like I have read before, or will probably ever read again.

I Who Have Never Known Men is a lesson in futility in relentless disappointments in the reality that, no matter how much modern depictions have tried to tell us otherwise, most dystopias do not have a happy ending. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground.

As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl - the fortieth prisoner - sits alone and outcast in the corner. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only vague recollection of their lives before. Deep underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage.

I who never known men