Review of The Birth Yard by Mallory Tater
Mallory Tater, The Birth Yard. HarperCollins, 2020. $22.99 CAD
One day, you stumble upon several YouTube videos about a strange cult that controls women because they’re prone to hysteria. This cult dictates when women get their periods, how they have sex, and when they get pregnant. The cult leader opens an invitation for anyone to join. There’s no way people live like this, you think. You close your tab right away and try to push what you’ve just seen out of your mind.
In Mallory Tater’s debut novel, The Birth Yard, this inconceivable situation is reality for Sable Ursu, a girl who grew up in a world ruled by The Den. The Den is a cult that believes women are inherently inferior to men and has a rigid structure in place to enforce this belief. Now that Sable’s eighteen, she must take the next step prescribed by this society and breed with a “Match” that The Den’s leadership approves of. The novel follows Sable’s journey of slow rebellion as she goes from believing the teachings of The Den to defying those rules for the sake of her friends.
“The Trail” and “The Birth Yard” exist side by side with “The Main Stream”—or, reality as the novel’s reader knows it. Sable is taught that The Main Stream is a bad place full of war, disease, and crime—and the history books she reads in private corroborate this. The Trail is a safe world where men and women inhabit the roles they are naturally meant to fulfill. They stay far away from The Main Stream’s influence. This separation purportedly explains why The Trail is a peaceful, orderly place. Of course, the Men in charge of The Den forcefully enforce order at any hint of dissidence.
Tater builds the foundation of The Birth Yard on familiar dystopian premises. A world order is set in place. A protagonist untangles the only truths they know and eventually realizes the horrors of the world they inhabit. The author makes a commentary on the power dynamics that structure our own society. We know how it unfolds.
But what makes this book so gripping and so worth reading is the heightened tension Tater weaves into the narrative. Writing “Men” instead of “men” or “The Den” instead of “the den” is a skillful move on Tater’s part because it grounds the narrative in Sable’s perspective. Page after page, the reader roots for Sable, wanting her to reach a breakthrough and realize the horrors of the world she lives in.
Tater only gives us glimpses of how The Den grows and recruits members—through YouTube videos—but this is enough to make us reflect on the sinister spaces that we don’t know exist. At The Birth Yard, Sable meets other girls whose parents watched the leader’s videos. These parents agreed with the leader’s assessment of the inherent inferiority and hysteria of women, and joined The Den. The only life Sable knows is The Den, so she doesn’t know what terms like YouTube or boyfriends mean. These subtle gaps in Sable’s understanding slowly sink in with the reader, who realizes the all-encompassing and severe consequences of the world The Den has created.
And yet, the horrors of The Den are not entirely unfamiliar to the novel’s readers. Blaming women and girls for the sexual violences enacted against them. Punishing women for being sterile. Drugging women to keep them “calm” and “under control.” The premise of the novel might take place in a small, intensely patriarchal society, but the things that happen in The Den are not alien to The Main Stream.
Indeed, what is most chilling about The Birth Yard is that these patriarchal ideas and social structures can and do exist. It’s not a dystopian future that we can prevent, if only we put an end to misogyny, but a reality that could exist a few hours from where we live. We can point fingers at how horrible The Den is, but what about us in The Main Stream?
Manahil Bandukwala is an Ottawa-based writer, editor, and visual artist. She is the author of two chapbooks, Paper Doll (2019) and Pipe Rose (2018). She is on the editorial team of Canthius, a feminist literary magazine. She was longlisted for the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize, was the 2019 winner of Room magazine’s Emerging Writer Award. See her work at manahils.com.