"...you must learn not to have those around you drink your energy. I have learnt the hard way. As a child I used to give away light like it was nothing. Those without it would fill themselves up with all that good energy like I was an eternal font. The purest light attracts the most impenetrable darkness."
I have been saving this book for the autumnal equinox and the beginning of the dark season. It is a very quick read, more of a novella than a novel and I read it in a couple of hours. It is the story of a conversation between witches. Iris is a modern day witch in Edinburgh in August 2021. She uses channeling and astral projection to travel back five hundred years to visit the prison cell of Geillis Duncan who has been convicted of witchcraft. In her time, it is the beginning of December and the night before her execution.
If you have watched the TV series Outlander, then you will already be familiar with her name, but you might not be aware that Geillis Duncan was sadly one of the historical women who was caught up in the North Berwick witch trials in the sixteenth century.
In Hex, the author Jenni Fagan, has attempted to give Geillis a voice - a voice that was unjustly silenced by her accusers all those years ago, because as Fagin says in the book;
"A woman's voice is a hex. She must learn to exalt men always. If she doesn't do that, then she is a threat. A demon whore, a witch - so says everyone and the law."
The novella reads as one long conversation between Iris and Geillis. It draws you in from the very start and weaves a web of dread around the reader as the hours to execution are counted down, chapter by chapter. It explores not only the hysteria behind the witch hunts of that time, but also the male greed which perpetrated them. It also looks at how and why such witch hunts are still in play today, although we no longer refer to them that way. However, most women have felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickle when a strange man walks behind her on a dark street. For make no mistake about it, women are very much still being hunted by men who think that they are entitled to do so.
I have read lots of books about the witch trials, but I particularly liked this one because it also acts as a social commentary on modern crimes against women and the men who commit them - even those men in uniforms designed to protect us! In this work of historical fiction, recent news events seamlessly find their place, such as two murdered sisters being 'selfied' by male police officers, or the female participants of protest marches highlighting violence against women being beaten down, by yet more police officers!
When did the police stop being on our side? Were they ever on on our side really, or have we, as women, just been collectively gas-lighted on a massive scale by men who think a uniform protects them rather than us, and now their mask is beginning to slip?
Historically the safety of women has always been neglected. While as human beings we have the same right as men to walk through a park or down a street without coming to harm, sadly this isn't a right that we feel we can exercise. From Jack the Ripper in White Chapel, to the Yorkshire Ripper in the 1980s, to a young women walking home through London last year, being murdered by a policeman who tricked her, and whom she automatically trusted due to the office he held which she had been taught to respect, women frequently come to harm while simply going about their business, trying to live their lives.
We stick to brightly lit areas; we park as close to the shops as we can manage, we don't fill our cars with petrol after dark unless we have to, we lace our house keys through our fingers as we walk down the street. We watch, we look, we listen, we wait and see - and still we get raped and murdered for the crime of going out alone. Isn't this just another form of witch hunt? I don't know about you, but I'm so drained and worn out and exhausted by it, not to mention bloody angry!
I know I'm not alone. There are millions of angry women out there right now, not knowing who to trust, or even who to call when they are in trouble, because now we know that the goods guys could just as easily be the bad guys, but in the best disguise ever!
"It's just one bad apple" they say, and at first I believed them, but as more and more comes to light - in the Metropolitan Police, in my local police force, even in the Red Arrows FFS! - it seems that is not the case at all. The bad apples are many and they are infecting those around them. The policemen we once turned to for safety, have now turned on us. The perverts are now injecting us with rape drugs on the dance floors in pubs and clubs! How are we expected to defend ourselves against that?! The would-be rapists are so blatant, they run off wearing disco-shoes that light up in the night, having no fear of being caught, or of what the consequences will be if they are caught. It all feels so hopeless and until society begins to teach men and boys not to attack, women and girls will always have to de-fend for themselves. Suddenly the witch hunt feels very real.
Jenni Fagan's Hex weaves all of this together into a cohesive whole, as Iris and Geillis discuss the collective plight of women, where power is denied them all down the centuries and men are, consistently, the enemy predators at large. And people wonder why I'm single!
This is fantastic book for book clubs and reading groups as there are so many discussion points for exploring the lasting effect of the witch hunts on modern society and if we have learnt anything at all from the past. It is also the kind of book that men should be pinned down and forced to read! However, the question it left me with was this one. How much longer will men continue to get away with murder? And rape? And child abuse? And violence against women in all its disgusting shades of a bruise on her face?
They might not be hanging or burning us anymore - but the witch hunts have never really stopped, have they? This is because men indoctrinate themselves into believing they can treat women any way they like, and get away with it, because they feel that they are entitled to treat us that way. As Iris tells Geillis just before she is moved to the gallows;
"I would like to reassure you that five hundred years from now the fine line of misogyny no longer elongates from uncomfortable to fatal, yet I cannot. It's a form of brain-washing isn't it? When you dared look at those men around you, what did you see?
They all thought they were right.
In everything.
At all times.
What woman could question that?
A dead one!"
xxx
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