Between the Pages

I have frequently seen The Farm referred to as a dystopian novel, but I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate. It feels both horrific in many ways, and also extraordinarily close to reality. The titular Farm is Golden Oaks surrogacy centre, where rich women who maybe can’t have children, but often just don’t want pregnancy to ruin their figure (or they somehow feel they don’t have the time to be pregnant) pay vast sums of money for other women – typically women from a poor background – to carry their child. The Farm monitors it’s hosts every move – by video feed, ‘wellbands’ – basically a GPS tracker, and checking of their post and emails. Personal phones and computers are confiscated, and any transgression of the Farm’s strict rules result in a financial penalty, whereby the hosts lose part of their payment.

Jane is a Filipino woman, short of money and in need of a job to support herself and her baby daughter, and the Farm seems a good way to do that. But being apart from her child while carrying the child of an anonymous client takes its toll.

The books raises questions surrounding race, class and exploitation, and while I found it an absorbing and interesting read, it made me very angry at times. That’s probably the point. I liked Jane and her friend Reagan, who features heavily in the book, while I was not so keen on Jane’s aunt Evelyn, or Mae Yu, who ran the Farm for an extortionate salary. But despite the moral ambiguity of Evelyn and Mae, they were represented as believable and nuanced characters, as indeed were most of the others in the story.

So no, I would not necessarily class this is as a dystopian novel, but if you do like books in that genre, I would recommend it. Either way, it was certainly a thought provoking and emotive read.