A Woman Of The Future

David Ireland’s A Woman of the Future is a novel about a girl called Alethea Hunt, who has the misfortune to be born brilliant, observant and female in a world that would rather she became manageable. From childhood onward she records herself, analyses herself, invents herself, and generally refuses to become the tidy little person everyone else would find more convenient. The result is part diary, part confession, part psychological demolition job, and part instruction manual for becoming impossible.

Alethea grows up in Australia with a mind that will not sit quietly in the corner. She is precocious, difficult, funny, vain, wounded, ambitious, sexual, philosophical, contradictory and very much aware that ordinary life is a badly designed cage. She wants greatness, freedom, transformation, experience, power, love, knowledge, and possibly several other things that cannot be safely fitted into school, family, marriage or whatever society has left lying around for women to squeeze themselves into.

The title is beautifully ironic, because a “woman of the future” sounds like a shining modern promise, all progress, liberation and clean lines. Alethea is not that simple. She is not a poster for emancipation or a grateful beneficiary of enlightened times. She is rawer, stranger and more disruptive: a girl becoming a woman while trying to out-think the world, outgrow her body, outrun expectation and write herself into being before anyone else gets hold of the pen.

Ireland lets her voice dominate, which is exactly what she would have wanted and probably what everyone around her feared. The book moves through fragments, reflections, episodes, observations and self-examinations, giving the sense of a mind constantly rearranging its own furniture. Alethea can be comic, cruel, grandiose and painfully exposed, often within the same emotional weather system. She is not asking to be liked, which is fortunate, because she has more urgent work: becoming.

There is a fierce little war here between personality and category. Daughter, student, lover, woman, body, intellect, future, case study, genius, nuisance: every label tries to settle her, and every label fails. The novel understands that identity is not always a graceful unfolding. Sometimes it is a wrestling match in a locked room with language, desire, memory and everyone else’s expectations shouting through the door.

For readers of Australian literary fiction, feminist fiction, experimental coming-of-age novels, diaries-that-are-not-quite-diaries, and characters who do not so much develop as conduct a hostile takeover of themselves, this is a sharp and unusual book. It has the unsettling pleasure of watching a mind insist on its own scale, even when the world keeps offering smaller containers.

Good copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books. A solid Penguin survivor of a novel about becoming oneself under protest, which is probably the only honest way anyone has ever done it. Ready for readers who like their literary fiction clever, prickly and not especially interested in behaving for the brochure.

Keep browsing: See more Fiction books Other books by David Ireland