Synopsis:
From her cell in a mysterious convent, a woman writes the story of her life in whatever she can find—discarded ink, dirt, and even her own blood. A lower member of the Sacred Sisterhood, deemed an unworthy, she dreams of ascending to the ranks of the Enlightened at the center of the convent and of pleasing the foreboding Superior Sister. Outside, the world is plagued by catastrophe—cities are submerged underwater, electricity and the internet are nonexistent, and bands of survivors fight and forage in a cruel, barren landscape. Inside, the narrator is controlled, punished, but safe.
But when a stranger makes her way past the convent walls, joining the ranks of the unworthy, she forces the narrator to consider her long-buried past—and what she may be overlooking about the Enlightened. As the two women grow closer, the narrator is increasingly haunted by questions about her own past, the environmental future, and her present life inside the convent. How did she get to the Sacred Sisterhood? Why can’t she remember her life before? And what really happens when a woman is chosen as one of the Enlightened?
A searing, dystopian tale about climate crisis, ideological extremism, and the tidal pull of our most violent, exploitative instincts, this is another unforgettable novel from a master of feminist horror.
Review:
Tender is the Flesh hit English readers like hammer to the head when it arrived in 2020. The incredibly divisive story of a world turned to industrial cannibalism offers none of the prurient thrills one might expect from a “cannibal” novel, instead delivering a slow burn existentialist drama that builds to a devastating conclusion.
The Unworthy is built on more familiar ground.
Set in a post-apocalyptic world of climate collapse apparently exacerbated by AI tyranny, it’s a setting familiar from everything from The Road, MaddAddam, The Road Warrior, Station Eleven, and a hundred survival video games. At least, on the outside it’s familiar.
For the most part, the characters of The Unworthy are protected from any Mad Max goings on, as we’re tucked safely behind the protective walls of the convent of the Sacred Sisterhood. Sure, their food is mostly cricket flour and water, but there’s something like a stable society.
Well, maybe not so stable.
Life in the convent is essentially fascistic, a recurring theme for Bazterrica, with a rigid hierarchy that looks something like a religiously ordained class system that leads up to an unseen Him at the peak, a voice from behind a screen that may as well be God. But it’s God’s instrument, the Superior Sister who is the dangerous one, running the convent with an iron hand and a literal whip: Nurse Ratched in a wimple. Contrary to what one might initially think of when considering a convent, it does not appear to be a place that allows much interiority.
But our unnamed protagonist has, Winston Smith-like, secreted away some writing paper and ink (sometimes blood) with which to break free of the convent’s absolute rule. It’s here that we learn of the goings on in the convent, but also of her back story, emerging in fits and starts, as a child navigating the wreckage of a lost civilization.
This would be little more than a portrait if not for the fact that a stranger comes to town, or rather, a strange woman makes it over the convent wall. Luciá is magnetic, wolf-like, and powerful, attracting our narrator emotionally and sexually, but also exhibiting the qualities that could mark her out as one of the Enlightened, one of the upper caste within the covent.
As the two women navigate this dichotomy, they begin to uncover an even more unseemly side of the convent, introducing a rather slight mystery element to the mix. It’s not much of a mystery, of course, because the reader can spot a fascist religious cult from the first pages, yet the fragmented first person point of view makes our narrator’s awakening still poignant and powerful.
Plot-wise, The Unworthy doesn’t offer many surprises. There’s no gut-punch moment as at the conclusion of Tender is the Flesh, and part of that is by design. There’s a kind of dramatic irony in watching our narrator come to realize what is painfully obvious to the reader, but it’s also not quite enough. The relationships are so distanced by the journal style that it’s hard to take individual deaths and sacrifices as deeply meaningful. But, as in Tender is the Flesh, one of the most moving relationships is with an animal, underlining–along with the novel’s overt ecological concern–that it is the human connection to the natural world that might well be the trick of this thing called living.
There’s also a kind of telegraphed message that writing, art itself, is an essential human activity, but this gets rather buried beneath the petty (and not so petty) horrors of the convent.
All in all, The Unworthy makes for, well, a worthy entry in Bazterrica’s translated catalogue, though it doesn’t quite land with all the hoped for power, which is a bit of a disappointment consider our current historical moment, with its multi-pronged attacks of environmental collapse, AI slop, and the disintegration of civil liberties, could be well served by a book ready to hold up that particular mirror. The Unworthy‘s mirror might just be a bit too narrow to take that all in.
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