Alan Ayckbourn

Years ago a plague almost wiped out humanity and left all surviving females as carriers and all males as vulnerable to it. There had never been a cure - so the only way for the world to survive was to segregate the genders - women in the south, men in the north, no contact between them. Except for the pesky problem of pro-creation but artificial insemination takes care of that and when a boy is born, he is not vulnerable until puberty (or thereabouts) so a protocol had been created to ensure that boys are protected and move to the North when their time comes. Or so everyone believed. 50 years after the fall of the Divide, the novelist Soween Clay-Flin decides to tell the story of the fall of the Divide.

Using journal entries to tell a story has one big problem - the person whose diary is used is never there for everything. So instead of trying to work around that with author notes, the novel uses multiple sources - Soween's diary, her brother's Elihu's diary and the newspaper and council notes of the time. Elihu is one of the very few boys born into the all-female society - which allows both diaries to show the world from the eyes of both growing kids. The additional articles and extracts from official documentation and correspondence add the missing pieces in a story that leads to a place noone expects.

As women are the carriers and the plague kills any man in 10 days, the new order had convinced the women that they are responsible for the fall and enforces strict rules of behavior. And somehow the women at these times accepted it -- we never learn the full story of how the Divide came to be - we get the story as taught to the kids but even there, things don't always make sense. That separation of the genders also changes the idea of what is a normal relationship -- man/woman unions lead to death so they do not exist. Until Elihu falls in love that is.

It is obvious early in the novel that something is not right (and we know that the Divide is about to fall) - there are subtle clues here and there that the kids are not taught the whole story. Just how much of it they are not taught becomes clearer and clearer in time although the actual state of the world is revealed slowly and with a lot of red herrings along the way. And the end is heart breaking - even if the (in universe) foreword makes it clear that this is not a happy love story (if someone wants to read that as Romeo and Juliet in a post-apocalypses world, they won't be far off), the end hits hard. It is partially because all the earlier misdirection - Ayckbourn weaves a tale that makes you expect things to work out at the end. And they do - although not for everyone.

I am not sure what sounded scarier - the world as we saw it from the eyes of the two growing children or the world as we finally realized it to be later in the story. I would not want to live in either.

I liked this novel a lot more than I expected. The formatting (different fonts for each element) and the setup makes it look a bit weird but after reading it, I cannot imagine it being done any other way. If I have one issue with it, it is that I wish we had seen a lot more from the pre-history and from what exactly happened around the fall - the parts we saw were limited to what happened to our characters so it was never made clear how much of what everyone was taught was really the truth. Although the hints are there and maybe a summation is not really needed.… (mere)