Hurdy Gurdy us the third novel by Australian author, Jenny Ackland. A dystopian future Australia that doesn’t stretch the imagination all that far: “The infections and inquisitions, rumours of law changes and a strangled welfare system. Billionaires colonising the space stations. Our planet moving into extremity with heat events of fifty-degree days and fireflies arrived now in Tasmania. There are more households with generators than electricity running from wires.”

It's a place where “what was old is new again. There are land wanderers once more, they roam the country and do whatever they can to stay alive, they ask for work and sleep on bed rolls in the grass on roadsides. They strip wood and beg food, it’s tinkers and swaggies and bush cooks and shearers needing to get by. Travelling salespeople and tricksters and quacks selling oils and health juices”, and where nineteen-year-old Win travels around the country for part of the year with three other women and a girl in two vehicles, an old Bedford truck, and Queenie’s Mercedes. They are Gold’s Family Show.

They might just be the smallest show on Earth, but they have enough acts to attract an audience in each of the towns where they stop. There’s tumbling and juggling, also highwire; an eight-foot pedestal act and a comedy boxing act too; their Russian-born clown, Valentina does skits, the playlets, the social commentaries she calls them; bareback pony riding, a rope act, rings, and their finale is often Win’s high dive.

Win and Girl play the hurdies and, with Valentina, perform a clown act; the engineer looks after the vehicles and the gear, and constructs mechanimals they can operate from within; on the quiet, Ringmaster Queenie provides hairdressing (and something else they call reclamations) for women who need it. Lately, Queenie has added a free close shave for certain men. Pet, their Bengal Tiger, is well-fed. It does seem a bit naïve of Queenie to not consider that the disappearances of these men won’t be noted.

Queenie requires Win to learn this, to be ready to take over, and Win has mixed feelings about it, she has a firm theory about being good: “It’s not enough to be a little bit good, or only good to some people. You have to be good to everyone who deserves it all of the time and even to some of the people you think don’t deserve it, even to them as well. You have to be good for being good, because it’s the right thing to do. No one is perfect, no one can be good all the time. But you have to try.”

Queenie’s little group tries to keep to themselves and stay under the radar. They definitely avoid the Saviours, who are against alcohol and for babies. They encounter with Reverend Francis Abernathy Goldfinch Jones and his assistant, known only as Sister. The man preaches for temperance and against abortion, proving he is cut from the same cloth as the Saviours.

Sister, though, is a bit of an enigma: she allows Jones to believe he has corrected her thinking, attends to his every need and acts submissive, but remains inquisitive and keeps a notebook. When a father comes to Jones to report on the death of a daughter, Sister sees below the surface of his claims. But she accompanies Jones when he begins his dogged hunt for Queenie and her small band…

Ackland gives the reader some lovely descriptive rose. She sketches her characters using anecdotes about their lives which, unfortunately, leaves them lacking depth, although she does endow them with some profound philosophies. In her dystopian setting the gender divide is reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale while the social divide has a Hunger Games feel. Ackland omits quotation marks for speech, which will irritate some readers and her ending is long on ambiguity and short on resolution. The role of clowns is thoroughly explored in this thought-provoking, challenging read.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Allen & Unwin.

Set in a near-future, post-climate catastrophe Australia where violence against women (wives, girlfriends, daughters, strangers) is commonplace, accepted and unchecked, "Hurdy Gurdy" is a vividly drawn road trip through a nightmare post-industrial landscape where the wreckage of society (shopping centres, shuttle programs, $400 exorcisms, automata) sits cheek by jowl with tent revival churches, floating dental practices, and a travelling circus of disparate women (who also dispense abortions and hair cuts to desperate women and "close shaves" to wife beaters, incestuous parents and rapists). In Ackland's hands, a hazy, blasted landscape, sad clowns in the Russian tradition, asteroid dust, lost astronauts, and humanity at its basest, are all entirely plausible things, woven together.

Told from two perspectives - that of 19-year-old Winnstay or "Win" and that of "The Woman", a nameless religious fanatic who is the coercively-controlled help meet of a maniacal, transient male preacher - the reader is inexorably drawn towards the devastating collision of two diametrically opposed causes (women helping women vs men who impregnate and terrorise women by any means possible).

You can't look away from the evocative writing:

About Valentina the sad Russian clown: "She reaches out and puts a hand on each person's shoulder and with that somehow she's gone inside them, she's made them feel something they didn't arrive with. I don't know how she does it, it's a kind of magic. What's the point of making people laugh if all you're doing is sending them back to their lives the same as before? she says. They need to be changed."

About the state of society: "For the rest of us, internet service is glitchy and sometimes they switch it off and this makes people angry because what can they do with their opinions then?"

And: "You see, the whole planet is sick and humanity is the disease."

On what passes as faith in the world of "Hurdy Gurdy": "... in the distance gather flocks of long-legged birds. They stand, seemingly without purpose. They could be feeding, they could be starving, and the question has to be will they lie down and die with grace when the end comes? This is my question for them and for myself."

The reading experience was marred by serious issues with the e-ARC towards the second half (including multiple missing chunks of text and different POVs leading straight into each other). Nevertheless, "Hurdy Gurdy" was a challenging and memorable reading experience, worthy of persevering with to the very last, deeply unsettling scene where there are no fixed answers. If you like reading on the edge of your seat, facing into the unexpected, "Hurdy Gurdy" is for you.

Hurdy Gurdy by Jenny Ackland is a feminist near future dystopian with an all-female travelling circus that does abortions on the side. Yes you read that correctly.

This book was a lot. A lot of themes and a mish-mash of style and tone which for me didn't quite work. Why the circus performance setting? It gave off Station Eleven vibes but did not have the strength of writing and plot to carry it off. It was chaotic and unnerving and odd. There was a feminism vs religion battle happening. I'm sorry to say this one was just not for me.

Thank you to @netgalley and @allenandunwin for my #gifted copy. Hurdy Gurdy is out 4 June.

This is an unusual and original novel set in a climate ravaged Australia. The story follows two separate groups. First, narrated by Win, is a rundown circus troupe, all women, plus a tiger and a horse. On the side, Queenie, the matriarch performs ‘reclamations’ (abortions) for desperate women. One of the other women in the circus, Valentina is Russian and there’s these strange interludes about the history of clowns and communist humour. The other narrative line is narrated by ‘The Woman’. She accompanies a preacher who treats her like rubbish and who wants to track down whoever is doing abortions. All civil society seems to have collapsed, and the treatment of women seems to have regressed to extreme misogyny.
It’s a strangely compelling read and I’m sure I’ll be thinking about it for a while.

"We have to think of the women first. We have to help them. Men protect each other so we women have to do the same." I liked the concept of Hurdy Gurdy more than the execution. I found it a bit of a dreary and confusing read in the first half of the book. Once you finally understood it is a story about a troupe of traveling circus performers who also performed abortions, including er... late abortions where they dispatch the odd child rapist or wife beater ("Queenie calls it a dispatch, a community service"), it started to flow better and get a bit of tension.

I assume the front of the book is deliberate blurry as it overlaps with Win coming to awareness of what she's assisting the circus matriarch Queenie to do in the "reclamations". The early chapters have a sing-song tone and a lack of certainty that I found hard to engage with. There are snippets that draw upon historical Australian responses to sexual violence: "It sits inside the woman, it has a mechanism built-in that shreds anything that goes in, it might be a finger or something else." These nuggets kept me reading, but in small doses: I took nearly two weeks to finish it.