Lady Business

I am glad to finally be able to read this review! I just finished this book. It made me physically ill at least twice, it made me scared to be in my apartment alone, and yet I didn't want to stop reading it. I still don't really know how I feel. Because it didn't seem like a romp through dead female bodies. I really felt that Beukes was trying to say more than that, with the particular social and political and personal circumstances that she gave the "shining girls." I think what stuck with me was Harper's line that "It’s not my fault. It’s yours. You shouldn’t shine. You shouldn’t make me do this." But at the same time, he's devastated to find the one girl who doesn't "shine" anymore. He doesn't get "joy" out of it unless he's stamping out real potential in the women, real power. It's sort of impossible for me not to read this as commentary on the world reacting to women who are somehow defying conventions or seeking attention or seeking to change things or just succeeding. But then, Harper is also presented as a psychopath who doesn't even seem to know why he does what he does, which removes some of the power of that metaphor for me? But it also didn't really occur to me to read the mysterious House as part of that metaphor, and I still don't know if I do/can, so I did still keep getting distracted by the loving detail in the violence and the mystery of the purpose or beginning of it all.

That's what I keep coming back to when I think about the women Harper kills. Harper, our serial killer and sociopath, not only kills these women, but he removes the potential of them from history. He removes all the good they would have done, the changes they would have wrought in their worlds, whether it would have been political or social or otherwise.

Basically this!

I thought it was also enormously important that Chicago is the backdrop, and that the most recent Chicago surrounding the House is the Chicago in the worst shape? It's not until the most recent time depicted in the book that the entire surrounding neighborhood is written off and left to decay and violence. I'm not sure how closely this was tied to the fact that the treatment of women doesn't get better throughout the history, but it struck me.

I didn't love this book, I guess, or think it was wholly successful in its intentions, but it did make me think.

And then the Guardian described Beukes as having "enormous fun" with the time travel concept. And, wow, I just don't know. I know what they meant but, just wow. The fact that the time travel concept can be separated from the time traveling serial killer targeting women concept, and then described as "enormous fun," seems emblematic of part of the book's whole point. :/ Which then makes me like it more!