Amane is ten years old when she discovers she's not like everyone else. Her school friends were all conceived the normal way, by artificial insemination, and raised in the normal way, by parents in 'clean', sexless marriages. But Amane's parents committed the ultimate taboo: they fell in love, had sex and procreated. As Amane grows up and enters adulthood, she does her best to fit in and live her life like the rest of society: cultivating intense relationships with anime characters, and limiting herself to extra-marital sex, as is the norm. Still, she can't help questioning what sex and marriage are for.
But when Amane and her husband hear about Eden, an experimental town where residents are selected at random to be artificially inseminated en masse (including men who are fitted with artificial wombs), the family unit does not exist and children are raised collectively and anonymously, they decide to try living there. But can this bold experiment build the brave new world Amane desires, or will it push her to breaking point?
"'The concept of family doesn't exist in that world, does it? Before long the effect of the forbidden fruit will wear off and humans will end up returning to paradise.' I murmured, although I didn't really believe it. 'Sex aside, can society really function well without family.'"
Review:
Imagine a world where your very creation is controlled - where falling in love or having sex isn’t how you’re supposed to have children. Where after the loss of countless men during world war 2, we turned to artificial reproduction and never went back, not just losing sex but romance and love eventually, too. Welcome to Amane’s world, one where she is the anomaly for being conceived by two people in love. In fact, love is something entirely novel, not something that should interfere with marriage or family. It's an alternative universe where we're still shaming the way people live and start families, controlling their bodies, but from another angle.
Murata has created another vivid, feverish universe — one unsettling in it’s beautiful exterior but with a dark underbelly, where women get automatically given implants when they start their period so they can never have a child the unapproved way and people associate love with fictional characters but never people. At points sex between husband and wife is even considered incestual, because you’re family - offering this jarring reality where people have been so slowly worn down and warped that even basic love is stripped away from us and sex has become something strange. Women can’t marry each other because men can’t create children alone, marriage becomes a job, sex becomes dirty and love becomes a commercialised hobby. Watching as a young Amane tries to understand sex was deeply uncomfortable, but it painted a world that’s possible when we try so hard to control and alienate people that everything becomes distorted.
When we meet this new experimental society, built in the ghost of Amane’s old hometown, has a dangerous kind of allure. Children raised by communities, men given the chance to grow their own children, but adults with no control over if they get chosen to reproduce, no concept of family or partnership, children being reduced to nameless livestock with no need for human connection.
There’s something about this authors writing that flows in such a satisfying way, dreamlike, smooth, almost ethereal in its prose. The jarring discomfort of such strange words being delivered in a bright, beautiful way. It played with the concepts of morality, coercion, normality in a clever way. However as much as I've loved Murata's work in the past for it's bold strangeness, it almost feels like it's odd for oddness sake.
At times this story just felt repetitive, consistently elaborating on the same ideologies and metaphors and I’ll be honest, the ending just left me feeling quite sick and I hope there was some deeper purpose behind it but in my opinion, there were plenty of other ways to create the metaphors and meanings she portrayed than weren’t the ones she chose. The whole thing left a very bitter taste in my mouth and ruined what was at the start a brilliantly subversive social commentary and speculative tale.
⭐⭐
- Silent World will be available on 24th April from Granta Publications. I received a reviewers copy of this title.
- This title contains subjects that may be triggering included underage sexual assault, implied sexual assault and abuse.
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