The Beauty - Aliya Whiteley
I received a free review copy of this book via NetGalley. This re-issue of The Beauty also comes packaged with Whiteley's short novel The Arrival of Missives, which I intend to read and review separately.
- Publisher – Solaris
- Published – Out Now
- Price – £18.99 hardback | Kindle £7.99
Sometimes you read a book that defies explanation, that's entirely unlike anything else you've ever read. The Beauty is one of those books, and I have no idea how to talk about it.
Somewhere out in the wilderness, away from the bustle of civilisation, a commune of men gather round a fire to hear tales of the way things are and the way things used to be. All of the women are dead, buried out in the woods where strange yellow mushrooms grow from their graves. All the women are dead everywhere, it seems, and the surviving men don't know how to continue.
What begins as a fairly typical post-apocalyptic setup (though we don't receive any details about what caused this mass death of women or, in fact, whether this has impacted the wider world beyond the small community we're focusing on) very quickly takes a hard left turn into the realms of the weird. The dead women return from their graves in the form of mute mushroom people who the men find almost irresistibly arousing. They cook, and clean, and fuck, and the men begin to bear their mushroom children, and slowly a divide forms in the settlement between those who see this as wrong and those who want to protect the Beauty - and their new way of life - at all costs.
There's a lot of weird fungal body horror at the core of the novel, as the men become pregnant with mushrooms and their genitals shrivel and fall off. The prose is full of an almost visceral disgust regarding all things bodily, weak, dependent. It makes for an interesting read, not least because much of the "horror" here is so clearly a metaphor for pregnancy and the way women's bodies are treated by society. I suspect that for people who have borne children the "horror" of the transformations the men undergo won't feel particularly shocking at all.
The Beauty doesn't give much away, and on the surface it could be quite easy to read it as a simple "what if men weren't the dominant gender?" narrative, but there's much more going on here than that. Beneath the surface The Beauty is concerned with how society constructs gender, and how society tells women that they must be beautiful, and nurturing, and kind, and silent, and constantly sexual, always second to men. Atop that it's also about gendered violence and the way in which society enables it and in many ways rewards it.
Any story about a gendered apocalypse that presents gender as a binary inevitably runs into criticisms of being trans-exclusionary. And given that much of the body horror in The Beauty lies in what is essentially a forced physical transition of the men I think it's fairly easy to make that criticism here. It's a complicated one, because this is very much an issue inherent to the "gender apocalypse" sub-genre as it currently stands, but I do think Whiteley takes some interesting steps here. Much of the narrative involves setting up binaries - men and women, young versus old, fact versus fable, humanity versus monstrosity, tradition versus progress - and then blurring the lines until it's no longer clear whether there was ever a divide to begin with. This may not land for all readers, as on the surface it presents an understanding of gender that's at best outdated and at worst has been aggressively weaponised by TERFs in the decade since this novella was originally published. But if you're able to look beyond that and give Whiteley the benefit of the doubt, I think there's still a powerful piece of writing here about power, violence, nature, and the way in which stories shape our society.
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