The Book of the Unnamed Midwife is a stunning debut

The Book of the Unnamed Midwife is Meg Elison’s debut novel – and what a debut it was! After reading it, it’s clear to me why it won last year’s Philip K. Dick award, and that the sequel is a contender for this year’s PKD is no surprise.In The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, Elison displays a raw understanding of what it is to be human. Her vision of the world immediately post-apocalypse is nothing particularly new – but it is a pure, distilled, biting vision, a natural evolution of the post-apocalypse narrative that rings achingly true.

Elison’s narrative follows one woman (the unnamed midwife) through miles of trek and years of hard life, and at no point is it a struggle for the reader to follow her. Somehow, though, Elison manages this – bringing us along with the woman both from the POV of narration and through the woman’s extensive journaling – making the people, the settings, and the action all feel true-to-life real without getting overly precious or florid in her descriptions. It’s hard to really accept that this is Elison’s debut publication, given the immense amount of surety she has in her writing, evidenced by her skillful economy of words.

The book is split perhaps 1:2 between the woman’s journals and the narration of her story, and it’s a balance that serves the book faithfully and well. It humanizes the woman, allowing Elison to skimp a little in the narration of, say, the woman’s motives and feelings. This keeps the narration tight and moving, but also keeps us not just invested in the journal entries but also forces the reader’s point of view to align with the woman (even when we otherwise might not empathize directly with her experiences, her world being a post-apocalyptic wasteland and all). However, I will say that Elison chose to incorporate some small shorthand into the woman’s journal, and I found that at times it felt natural and at other times it interrupted my experiences of the woman’s voice through her journal. For example:

When it feels natural, the shorthand serves to liven up the woman’s voice and make it feel both real and immediate. However, when it doesn’t read naturally, it can be quite the stumbling block. I did also hear that this “=” in particular proved to be a point of confusion when listening to the audiobook.The woman herself feels wonderfully real and human as a character. Some small part of mystery does remain about her throughout the book, which serves to remind us (even in the midst of action) that in this world, the Unnamed Midwife is the stuff of legend.

I find more and more that this concurrent awareness is a quality I enjoy and admire in books, and Elison uses it to great effect in The Book of the Unnamed Midwife. Though the narrative doesn’t jump back and forth through time, like some books do, the woman’s story is prefaced by a future vignette, which gives the woman’s story a particular context which it does not quite shake no matter how engrossed the reader becomes in the woman’s experience. That awareness left me watching the woman from two POVs simultaneously: from over her shoulder as she makes her way through the new world and through the haze of history and legend (given form in that first vignette).