The Book of the Unnamed Midwife is post-apocalyptic feminist novel written by American author Meg Elison, published in 2014 by Sybaritic Press. This novel is the winner of the Philip K Dick Award for Distinguished Science Fiction. It is the first novel in The Road to Nowhere Trilogy.
Setting & Plot
Prologue
The prologue lays out a radically changed world where the buildings have sustained major damage and the glass in windows have been replaced with plastic sheets. Readers are introduced to a school and a teacher called Mother Ina who wears a hollow wooden apparatus designed to look like a pregnant belly. She begins instructing a class of prepubescent boys on copying down the story of the unnamed Midwife, similar to how monks would copy the Bible by hand before the invention of the printing press. She tells the boys, and through them, the reader, that what they are about to embark on is a defining story of how their community came to be. It is a sad and difficult story, and Mother Ina warns the boys that parts might make them feel sad, angry, or sick.
She gives hygiene instructions to the boys, further indicating the value of the books. The book, which is actually a series of journals written by the unnamed Midwife, is the story of how our world became theirs.
The Book of the Unnamed Midwife
The beginning of the book is recorded as January 15th. The Midwife is a labor and delivery nurse who is in a relationship with a handsome research doctor named Jack and she works at the University of California San Francisco medical hospital. She has heard of a serious disease, that she calls “the fever thing”, which seems to pop up all at once, everywhere. She notices that it seems to be especially deadly to women, parents that are actively giving birth, and their neonates.
This new pandemic is highly lethal, killing about 95% of the men, 99% of the women, and, as far as the Midwife knows 100% of the children that contract it.
The Midwife herself gets the disease but becomes one of the very few who survived it. In the shock of waking up alone in a hospital full of dead people, she heads home.
Throughout the book from this point on, the perspective of the book switches from the Midwife’s first-person accounts via entries in her journal to occasional first-person accounts from other survivors and a third-person omniscient account of a narrator who talks about the impact of the pandemic on the Midwife, the other survivors that she meets, as well as on the wider world.
Back at home, she learns that the water is no longer working, and her groceries have mostly gone bad. As she eats and drinks a few shelf-stable items, she tries her TV, which is also dead. After sleeping for over a day she is woken up when a strange man gets into bed with her. He attempts to rape her, but the Midwife slices his throat open with her pocketknife. He dies, bleeding out on her bed, and she grabs a few things, including her journal, and leaves the apartment.
She wanders the Tenderloin district dazed until she smells someone cooking and discovers a gay man named Joe using an abandoned restaurant to make food. The first time she introduces herself is the first time she decides to change her name.
The Midwife tells Joe her name is Karen, the name of someone who died a week ago. She tells her journal that she feels that revealing her name would be giving away some kind of power, or intimacy, that she’d rather keep to herself.
After Karen and Joe eat the pupusas that he was cooking, another man comes running in with a leg tangled in razor wire. Joe introduces the man as his boyfriend, Chicken, so nicknamed for winning games of chicken then selling the cars for income. The Midwife uses her skills as a healer to help Chicken with his leg.
They walk to a mall and split up looking for supplies. After raiding a coffee shop, she sees a group of four men, and notices how they stop and gape at her. She doesn’t understand what is happening, but her instincts tell her to run and she turns to run just as one of the men uncoils a length of chain from his fist. She’s running through the mall when she sees Joe and Chicken running after her. They get out of the boarded-up mall first and hide in a dumpster until they are sure the men are gone.
After they escape, Chicken makes it clear that he and Joe no longer want her to travel with them because she’s a woman. He says that gangs of heterosexual men would fight or even kill them to get her, and Chicken is not about to chance it. Joe shrugs and follows Chicken.