By: Izabella Engelbrink
Enclosed underground thirty-nine women are kept in a cage. Male guards stand outside the metal prison like statues, silently observing, never speaking. The women seldom know how they’ve ended up behind the metal bars, and know nothing of what waits for them outside.
For readers who gravitate towards science fiction or dystopian novels looking to diversify their reading collection, then I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman would be a perfect read. I Who Have Never Known Men is a unique post-apocalyptic novel. Rather than an action-packed read, the crux of this novel explores community, knowledge, love, loneliness, and the sacredness of humanity. Harpman forcefully put readers in the lonely mind of the last woman alive; its end will leave readers staring at the wall contemplating the sanctity of life, and shared experiences.
The novel follows thirty-nine women of various ages kept in a cage underground, including the nameless narrator who is the youngest of the women; her entire adolescence was spent in the cage. While the other women have vague remembrance, our narrator is the only one who doesn’t remember life or human experience before the cage.
One day, an alarm goes off and the male guards abandon the underground, leaving the cage unlocked and the women alone. One by one, the women leave the cage and face the empty void of land for the first time. Setting out on a plan of survival, the thirty-nine women start walking the vast land and stumble upon other cages of women and men, not unlocked, with rotting corpses. The women soon realize they’re the last humans alive.
Harpman forces readers into our narrators every thought, and at times severe actions in means of survival and death, when she faces the heavy burden of caring for the women as they age and inevitably pass away. Throughout the novel, our narrator has little grasp of human nature, and often finds the other women absurd in their longing of life before the cage. The narrator is rattled by everything female, she doesn’t understand the deep connection of female friendship, and has little understanding of female autonomy.
Once the women escape, our narrator grows out of her childish ways, and becomes a key role in survival with her young endurance and drive. The women come to terms with being the last humans, and soon build their own cabins and livelihood. Throughout the course of the novel, the narrator continually grapples with the fact she will be the last alive; and has to watch all the women die. In the end, the once alienated confused girl is left wanting the one thing she never truly understood: humanity. She’s left completely alone and deeply human.
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman is a perfect book to expand your reading, if you’re someone who twists their hands in the philosophical “what if” questions, this novel is an excellent choice. While the story starts slow, the pace quickens rapidly once the women escape. From there, turning the pages becomes addictive. Harpman purposefully keeps a vagueness within the novel, she never discloses what put the women in the cage, what happened to the male guards, where the women are, if they are even on earth for that matter, or our narrator’s name and life before the cage.
Harpman keeps readers only in the frame of the narrator’s escape and survival up until her ultimate death. It’s easy to want an action-pacted post apocalyptic novel, but Harpman is astonishingly real in the unique singularity of I Who Have Never Known Men, she explores the loneliness of the last person alive, and how everyone, even a girl who grew up in a cage, craves humanity.
“It is strange that I am dying from a diseased womb, I who have never had periods and who have never known men”
