Get Access Sealed Originated By Naomi Booth Presented As Publication Copy

going to take a punt here and say that Sealed by Naomi Booth will be the most frustrating book I read all year,

There is so much about this novel I enjoyed ranging from Booths visceral, exquisitely grotesque prose to her social commentary on how society treats the poor and elderly.
Beyond the body horror, the most disturbing aspect of the novel is how quickly those who cant defend themselves have their basic rights stripped from them, leaving no choice but to submit to displacement camps established by the Government.
The suggestion that these people are abused and indentured to possible private interests reminded me of Octavia Butlers Parable of the Sower, Margaret Atwood borrowed a similar idea in hernovel The Heart Goes Last, The idea persists, not surprising given the current political climate and the western worlds treatment of the disenfranchised,

So, yes, when the novel plays to its strengths the gore, the social commentary its a delight to read, which makes it all the more frustrating that Booths depiction of Australia is so darn lazy.
Now, Im sure Booth either visited Australia on holiday or spent a few years here or gave a draft of the novel to a bunch of Australian mates, but whatever

feedback back she got both from her own experiences and those of others it doesnt translate into her representation of the country or its people.
Booths setting is a tourists narrow take on Sydney and New South Wales, Her small country town in the Blue Mountains could be located on Mars for all its similarities to a place situated on the east coast of Australia, But worse is her stereotypical, shrimp on the barbie, Crocodile Dundee portrayal of the people, Were all racists the word “abbo” is flung around with abandon and were misogynists all the men are objectifying arseholes, I know, I know Australia has its fair share of racists and misogynists, just look at the guys representing us in Parliament, Im also cognisant that theres a shift in language and a greater preponderance of Aussie slang when you leave the major cities, but Booths depiction lacks authenticity, Its inconsistent in tone the prose shifts wildly from elegant language some of it is indeed quite beautiful to ockerisms, regularly in the same paragraph,

If Booth were Australian, Id still be annoyed, but the fact that shes an outsider makes it all the more offensive, And heres the thing theres nothing about the story that requires it to be set in Australia, If Booth was going for a sense of isolation, Im sure there are places in the UK or Europe that would have provided the same effect, Im genuinely bewildered as to why she chose Australia given the inherent risk of not getting it right,

If youre not an Aussie, youll likely not have the same reaction that I did, Im sure there are some Australians that will look past the slang and the setting, Some Aussies may even believe that Booth has nailed us, For me, though, it was a dealbreaker, Id certainly read more by Booth just not stories set in Australia, A pregnant woman, who is basically afraid of everything, tries to survive a pandemic where people's orifices seal over, I wanted more of the disease stuff in the story, There was way too much of the main character's panicked thoughts about everything from her body to the environment to chemicals in their food,

She was probably the dumbest pregnant woman I've ever read about, I understand that she didn't want to be pregnant in the first place, and was avoiding preparing for the baby because she couldn't mentally handle the thought of giving birth.
But when the time comes she seemed bewildered that she had to push a baby out, and didn't know what the umbilical cord or placenta was,

I can't decide if it's astar or astar rating, The pandemic stuff was a unique idea which lead to some cool imagery, But I kind of hated the rest of the book, Rant review coming soon. Now THAT was an ending, The last twenty or so pages of Sealed are the closest thing a book has ever made me feel to that scene towards the end of a horror film when something horrific is about to happen or is happening and every fibre of your being wants to look away but your eyes remain glued to the screena because youre paralysed by terror, b because if you look away you known your imagination may well conjure things that are even worse than what the filmmakers came up with, c because youre a little bit curious to see how far the filmmakers will go and how many boundaries they will transgress, or d all of the above.
That was what the last twenty pages or so of Sealed were like, I'd even go so far as to say it's a Rosemary's Baby for our times, Check out my full review over at my blog, Strange Bookfellows: sitelink wordpr Timely and suspenseful, Sealed is a gripping modern fable on motherhood, a terrifying portrait of ordinary people under threat from their own bodies and from the world around them.
With elements of speculative fiction and the macabre, this is also an unforgettable story about a mothers fight to survive,

Heavily pregnant Alice and her partner Pete are done with the city, Above all, Alice is haunted by the rumours of the skin sealing epidemic starting to infect the urban population, Surely their new remote mountain house will offer safety, a place to forget the nightmares and start their little family, But the mountains and their people hold a different kind of danger, With their relationship under intolerable pressure, violence erupts and Alice is faced with the unthinkable as she fights to protect her unborn child, This book reminded me of another book The End We Start From that I read recently about the experiences of a pregnant woman based during a time when the earth is not as we know it.
I think Sealed did a better job with this plot though and I enjoyed it much more it probably also helped that it was longer and so the author had more time to develop the story.


I liked how the author vividly portrayed the situation the main characters found themselves in and the challenges they faced trying to navigate this strange new world.
The ending was bittersweet but hopeful,

Also, a more accurate score for this book would be a,. A woman gets pregnant unexpectedly, just as the world careens toward a the most horrific ecodisaster you can imagine, The writing was great, the emotional landscape was truthful, and I'm going to read everything Naomi Booth writes from now on,

My fondest delight, when it came to my reading experience with this book, was the birth scene, I don't think it's much of a spoiler to say there is a birth scene, since the whole book before then is the story of a ponderously pregnant woman searching for a safe place to give birth, while simultaneously coping with some seriously creepy ecodisaster action.


This birth scene, when it comes, is magnificently done, Ok, it ignores the way that every contraction, in actual birth, is a peak experience of sorts, . . but even without that explicit kind of veracity, the scene captures the deepheart horrific truth about birth, It captures what it's like to have your body taken over by a primal force over which you have no control, No matter how great a woman's individual birth experience might be or how great she happens to remember it being, later, when it's over, every laboring woman comes to understand at some point unless she is utterly etherized, that her body is no longer hers.
. . and that realization can be momentarily disorienting, or completely terrifying, depending on how you feel in general about experiencing a total loss of control of your body, Naomi Booth nails it.

So at the heart of this ecohorrorfiction Naomi Booth has slyly written the best metaphor for birthterror that I've ever read,

Yeah!

Go, Naomi Booth!

I'm a fan, Part of theGuardian Not The Booker shortlist for which I am delighted to have been picked as a judge,

sitelink theguardian. com/books/boo

This book is published by Dead Ink, a UK small press focused on bringing” the most challenging and experimental new writing out from the underground and present it to our audience in the most beautiful way possible.
”

Impressively Dead Ink have two books on the GuardianNot The Booker shortlist this picked by public vote and sitelinkThree Dreams In The Key Of G picked by last years judges.


This book could be best described as a nearfuture dystopian, ecohorror based around pregnancy,

Perhaps the nearest recent literary equivalents are: the haunting motherhoodbased sitelinkFever Dream shortlisted for theMan Booker prize and the fragmentary novella sitelinkThe End We Start From where a new mother flees apocalyptic floods.


In this book, the first partyweeks pregnant narrator, Alice, has recently left the City clearly Sydney to move out to the countryside The Blue Mountains together with her partner Pete who initially comes across as a fairly onedimensional Aussie bloke.


For Alice, a worker in the local housing department, it is a chance to move away urban environmental pollution, before it is too late, In particular she is obsessed by a relatively new condition which has emerged Cutis, first observed in the local waste dump by a downandout whose mouth has sealed over, asphyxiating him.
Whereas official reports downplay the danger of this condition, Alice, through her work, internet research and blogging is convinced it is far more widespread and common that admitted and has contributed to many deaths ascribed to other conditions including that of her mother.


For Pete, he is also looking for a clean start and new environment but the pollution he thinks that they are escaping is Alices obsession with the condition which he sees as verging on hysterical later another male character Paulie drags her away at a barbeque claiming you had a total epi out there.
. . youre having a panic attack that is all, Interestingly as an aside the author, a teacher of creative writing, has an academic specialism in the literary history of swooning,

Like another book on the Not The Booker shortlist sitelinkRaising Sparks the epigraph is taken from The Book of Job in this case Job:, which in versesays Thou didst clothe me with skin and flesh.


However the key text to understanding this book Alice, remembers from her childhood her single parent mother, estranged from her strict nonconformist British parents, draws on her vets assistant experience to comfort Ali through her childhood cuts and scrapes by reassuring her

Thats how clever the skin is, she said, it makes the bad things disappear

Most obviously this comes across in the condition Cutis.
Even after the first outbreaks an expert diagnoses a potential link with pollution and with the skins mechanisms:

The condition might, he suggested, be similar in mechanism to an autoimmune disease: a potentially deadly, misdirected defence response.
The skin in these. . cases was acting in aberrant ways, knitting together in disastrous patterns: might it be, he speculated, that the skin was attempting to protect the body from dangerous environmental pollutants, sealing the body off in the process.

However what is impressive about the novel is how the same ideas are also examined from different angles,

The Cutis disease exacerbates two existing divides in society between the privileged and the disadvantaged: the rich increasingly sealing themselves off from the poor the first world seeking to seal itself off from the third world.

For those with expensive tastes, protected food guaranteed an indoor reared product, with minimal exposure with atmospheric pollution and chemical treatment, Those who could afford to bought the special food, bought their face masks for high polution days, bought their private insurance for highspeed surgery, . only poor people ever seemed to die from cutis, poor people far away, or poor people at home who didn't take care of themselves, Only the feckless and faraway had anything to fear,

And, even more chillingly, the authorities use the state of environmental crisis to facilitate aggressive policies which further exacerbate this divide: shutting down on rural services, carrying out a form of socioethnic cleansing aimed at the poor, the rural and the original native population who are encouraged to displaced peoples camps and ramping up the use of offshore displaced peoples camps to stop wouldbe immigrants reaching the mainland.
A reader cannot help me reminded of the way in which the financial crisis was used to justify austerity policies,

And then the same theme of “sealing off” is examined more personally in terms of Alice and her relationships, Alice is, an introvert, and also someone who has sealed herself of emotionally unwilling to expose herself to the dangers of relationships and make herself vulnerable to hurt, When she first realises Pete, a childhood friend, loves her she thinks What bit of the tiny sliver of myself that I allowed to escape can possibly have given you enough grounds for love.
When she does open up to Pete, and is hurt, her mental skin seals back over and she holds herself back from any future commitment even after the unplanned pregnancy forces them back together.


After her first enthusiasm and betrayal she reflects on relationships that after the first flames, everything is just dying sparks an interesting counterpoint to the title of “Raising Sparks” which is taken from its Jobsourced epigraph.


Her emotional distance applied also to her mother in fact she realises that Pete as a child was closer to her mother, who Alice pushed away and now that distance and sealing off threatens to apply to her unborn child.


The author, with past success as a short story and novella writer, makes a very successful transition to the novel form managing to pack in a range of themes in in a relatively short novel.


And just as these themes have been explored, the book then ends in a horrific, visceral, but still intriguingly open, climax,

Recommended. .