In the convent of the Sacred Sisterhood, at the end of the world, lives a group of women controlled by piety, devotion and their ability to suffer for their supposed sins. Ruled over by the Superior Sister and the mysterious “Him,” the women are allowed to live in relative safety from the dangers of the outside world, where pestilence, climate change and other unnamed perils would certainly shorten their life spans dramatically. But what of the constant fear of life inside the convent, what of the constant impending violence? What of the indoctrination and religiosity of the Sisterhood that encourages the women to hurt themselves, hurt each other to climb up the ranks of the Chosen? What exactly are they being Chosen for anyway, and is it really better to live these heavily monitored, restricted lives, safe from dangers untold, than it is to be outside the convent walls?
Augustina Bazterrica’s epistolary novel The Unworthy asks many questions, and leaves much to the reader’s imagination, in the best of ways. Presented as a first person narrative of diary entries written by one of the Unworthy, a nameless woman in the convent who is going to great risks to share her thoughts by writing them in stolen ink, dirt, in “the indigo of poisonous berries,” even blood. Her story is secret, clandestine, a dangerous rebellion, but she will risk anything to tell it, to try to make sense of what is happening around her, to her.
She arrived at the convent like all the Unworthy do, “as lost causes… all wanderers before we came here.” Of any wanderers who find their way to the walls of the convent, only women are allowed in, because “the House of the Sacred Sisterhood does not permit the entry of men, children or the elderly.” Men, we are told, are shot on sight. Children or the elderly have never been seen. The Unworthy are all “young women, with no marks of contamination; we haven’t aged prematurely like the servants and have no blotches on our bodies; we have all our hair and teeth, no lumps on our arms, no black sores on our skin.”
There are other women in the Sisterhood too: the three orders of the Chosen: the Minor Saints whose “voices can reach the universal notes, vibrate with the light of the stars” but have their eyes are sewn shut, so they’re not distracted by the mundane; the Diaphanous Spirits who twirl like dervishes but have their tongues cut out; and the Full Auras whose ear drums are perforated so they are not distracted by noise, and can “discern the divine signals, the hidden signs.” The Unworthy are told that these Enlightened ones can anticipate catastrophe, and help save them, as “mediators between us and the ancestral divinity, the hidden God who has always existed, who predates the gods created by men.”
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The Unworthy
To rise in the echelons of the convent’s order is to be one of the Enlightened. This is something each of the Unworthy is desperate for; the Enlightened are given real food: “apples, carrots, cabbage,” while the rest eat “cricket soup, cricket bread, cricket snacks, crickets with turmeric, spicy crickets.” The Unworthy are told they have to pay their way to becoming Enlightened in pain: causing pain to themselves, helping cause pain to the other young women they live with. Torture of every kind: physical, mental, emotional. They are also required to survive environmental challenges with their pain: When there is a dangerous haze that burns their skin and makes it hard to breathe, for example, they are summoned “to atone with our blood. Flagellations, cuts, lashings so our God protects us, so the haze doesn’t kill us, so the natural disasters cease to plague the House of the Sacred Sisterhood.”
The narrator’s aim is to be chosen, even though she isn’t certain what that means, even though when she wanders too close to where the Enlightened are kept, she hears “a cry that was like a wail, and then a smothered scream, a scream like a growl, a growl like the silent lament of an animal lying in wait.” One night, while exploring spaces she should not be in, she finds a wanderer, a young woman called Lucia who has something special about her, something unique that changes the course of the narrator’s own story, and that of the convent.
The Superior Sister runs the convent, breeding crickets for food, meting out punishment, a tyrant reigning with violence and terror. No one knows who she is, or where she came from, but there are rumours that “the great catastrophe, the Superior Sister was a climate migrant, that she was part of an army that fought in the water wars, the wars that coincided with the disappearance of many territories, many countries, beneath the ocean.”
And so, in such fragments, Bazterrica offers up a frightening vision of what has happened to the environment:
[…] a world of floods, in which eight months of rain fell in less than an hour… the shifting of the earth; the tornadoes; the winds of more than a hundred kilometres an hour; the fallen trees; the animals walking in circles for weeks, for months, nobody able to explain it, until they went mad from exhaustion and died; the destroyed city; the hailstones like fruit falling from the sky, exploding like bombs, projectiles of ice fracturing the fragile veil of civilisation; the ruined crops; the extreme heat, fish cooked alive by the broiling sea, fish dying of thirst in the rivers, the droughts, the water wars, the shortages, the hunger, the thirst, the collapse…
The Unworthy is very much a story about a post-climate change world, asking questions about what really changes when our environment changes: Are humans doomed to repeat the same power struggles, regardless? Can we ever break away from the pull of violent instincts? Do we never learn? Why do we believe what we believe? Why do certain power paradigms come so easily to us, and why do we fall back into cruelty and tyranny, as if it is the only path to survival?
It is a testament to Bazterrica’s abilities as a writer that she is able to sustain attention continuously even with an unreliable narrator and a cast of mostly unlikable women. The narrator does some awful things; out of fear, out of spite, out of frustration… Whatever the reason may be, she does hurtful, terrible things to others, as they do to her. Every woman is struggling for survival and will do whatever it takes to win favour, or rise amongst the ranks, such as they are. It makes The Unworthy so much more interesting: The characters are terrible, flawed creatures and their emotions are relatable. Bazterrica has said in interviews that she is not interested in writing about women just as victims, nor is she interested in idealising female characters. It was evident in Tender Is the Flesh, and is more than evident in The Unworthy that she is interested in presenting female characters as nuanced, complicated, fallible and ultimately human.
There is an intimacy that is distinct to epistolary novels, one that helps create an overwhelming sense of dread in The Unworthy. We are only ever aligned with the nameless narrator as she suffers, causes suffering, flits between her past and her present. Her daily life is burdened with horror: Here, it is the mundane that is the feared, not the speculative.
We, as readers, only know what she knows, can only put together a bigger picture based on the fragments of information we are given, which may or may not be fact. And because this story is told by someone in secret, someone who can only write it in hiding and under time constraints, it is not told chronologically; sentences are left half written, lines are crossed out, there are gaps at what may feel like crucial moments. For some readers, these may feel like plot holes, but Bazterrica is much too skilled a craftsperson to leave gaping plot holes behind.
Her narrative forces a great deal of the onus on the reader; there is no pandering here, no condescension towards the reader, who is expected to keep up, to put pieces together. The prose, in all its fragments can feel claustrophobic at times, as it should, given the story. But it is never clumsy, though this style of storytelling can easily be; Bazterrica knows what she’s doing, as does translator Sarah Moses. Even the denouement leaves the reader with questions—there is power in that and Bazterrica knows it. Power in setting off the imagination and letting each reader’s mind do the worst they can.
Tender Is the Flesh was a visceral, evocative look at capitalism, climate change, factory farming and the extents to which humans will go to fulfill what they perceive of as needs. The Unworthy is an equally powerful though very differently structured look at power dynamics, climate change and ideological extremism. It is also a brutal look at exploitation and the dissolution of bodily autonomy under the guise of religion. As the Enlightened tell the Sisterhood, “without faith, there is no refuge,” and so survival becomes tied intrinsically and completely to a belief system centred around cruelty and control. Is this who we are? Is this who we will always be, asks the novel, and leaves the answers to us.
The Unworthy is published by Scribner.
Sounds dreadful! I look forward to reading it having greatly admired “Tender is the Flesh” and “19 Claws and a Black Bird”. Augustina has a dark and powerful imagination.