Few novels have had a more remarkable second life than The Handmaid’s Tale. When protesters wore red gowns and white bonnets outside the confirmation hearing for supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, their invocation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 masterpiece warned of the conservative threat to abortion access. The Handmaid’s Tale is the most celebrated work in a rich stream of speculative fiction by women that foresees struggles for control over reproduction: the fertility dystopia. In her debut novel The Farm, Joanne Ramos (who was born in the Philippines and moved to the US as a child) comes at this sub-genre from an intriguing economic tangent: what if surrogacy catering to the super-rich was taken to hypercapitalist extremes?
Located on a sumptuous mansion estate in upstate New York, the Golden Oaks “gestational retreat” is equipped with hi-tech facilities to optimise the pregnancies of resident “Hosts”. Executive Mae Yu painstakingly recruits candidates with the genetic profile, background and temperament that will garner big bucks from her billionaire clientele. With a chef and treatment rooms on hand, the Hosts are pampered into docility by the ostensibly gracious Mae. Yet she keeps a hawkish eye on the bottom line when back at her desk in Manhattan: “a stable and happy Host produces a healthy baby, which produces a … Satisfied Client”.
Mae’s iron-fist-in-a-velvet-glove regime runs into trouble when diffident Filipino incomer Jane gets chummy with Reagan and Lisa, white Americans more sceptical about Mae’s chicanery. Jane is depending on her delivery payout – “If she was careful, this big money would grow … into a fortress” – but finds herself unnerved by the system of surveillance and coercion. After Mae suspends a visit by her infant daughter Mali, a tactic regarded as “incentivisation”, Golden Oaks is rocked by clashes between avaricious management and mutinous Hosts.
The Farm is crammed with acutely observed scenes that place reproduction within an intricate web of class, gender and race. Mae is a sleek Filipino-American workaholic bent on securing the bonus that will help bankroll her chi-chi Manhattan wedding. She possesses few scruples about manipulating a naive emigre like Jane, despite their common heritage (she’s “never had any patience for identity politics”). Mae builds in-depth psychological profiles of her Hosts, referred to by number in meetings, in order to correct their failings and foibles. For example, to counteract the ennui of pretty, well-educated blonde Reagan, Mae ropes in an African American actress to play the deserving mother-in-waiting and so satiate Reagan’s “search for meaning”. Mae cannot quash Jane’s stress about her daughter so readily. Jane has entrusted Mali to the care of her elderly cousin Ate, a baby nurse with a gift for pacifying anxious rich mothers who see her as a “saviour”, yet it appears Ate is putting her business sidelines first. Not American-born or educated like Mae, Ate nevertheless possesses the same gimlet-eyed entrepreneurial savvy: neither presumes that a shared gender or race automatically entails sharing a side.
While such social ambiguities are finely etched, the plot dithers even after Jane gets to grips with Mae’s connivance. It may be unfair, however, to chastise Ramos for lacking the grand guignol audacity of Atwood, if her story is pointed much closer to home. Even though she exploits the Hosts’ vulnerabilities, Mae is no sadistic Aunt Lydia, instead a more recognisable corporate burn-out who resorts to calming visualisations when the pressure of placating wealthy clients gets too much.
The Farm doesn’t present a full-bore dystopia so much as occupy an uncomfortable space between now and the near future: if such an ultra-elite surrogacy venture doesn’t exist already, it surely will soon. In fact, the villain in The Farm is arguably unfettered capitalism. Mae truly believes the Hosts are “treated extremely well, and they’re compensated more than adequately for their efforts”. Yet while the wombs of Jane and friends may not be subjugated by force, the chasm of socioeconomic inequality throws free choice into doubt: the dystopia is now.
• The Farm by Joanne Ramos is published by Bloomsbury (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
