Autokrator
Emily A. Weedon
ISBN 9781770866850
440 pages
Release: April 13, 2024
Publisher: Cormorant Books

Autokrator, the debut novel by Emily A Weedon, brings with it some perceived credibility: Weedon is a Canadian Screen Award winner for best writing in a webseries. She’s also won or been nominated for 10 other screen writing awards. And she’s represented by Sam Hiyate of The Rights Factory. The novel is published by Cormorant Books, a Toronto-based publisher with a reputation for producing accessible, and sometimes award-winning books. All of that sets up an expectation of a scintillating, remarkable novel.

First, the marketing blurb so you’ll have an idea what this novel is about:

Born nameless, in a rigid, autocratic society that has relegated all women to non-person status — Unmales — two women fight against their invisibility.

The disappearance of yet another Domestic means Cera must take on extra duties and tend the rooms of The Cratorling, the young successor to the autocracy. Face-to-face with him, Cera realizes he is her son, taken from her at birth. She vows to make herself known to him, no matter the cost.

Driven by a Machiavellian mind and ego, Tiresius has successfully hidden her Unmale status in plain sight for years. She rose through the ranks of the autocracy to reach the highest levels of government. She revels in the power she has attained, but her ruse makes her a gender criminal, which is an act punishable by death.

Both Cera and Tiresius are determined to achieve their goals, but, for better or worse, their actions begin to dismantle the framework and foundations of the autocracy itself.

Hopeful and cautionary, Autokrator reimagines gender and power in society against the backdrop of an epic, deeply etched, speculative world.

Where do I begin? I’m sitting here at the keyboard a little hesitant to launch into this review. That hesitancy doesn’t arise from an effervescence of praise; rather, it arises from a remarkable sense of incredulity that Autokrator not only made it past an agent’s desk, but a publisher’s, and then the editor assigned to the manuscript. Had this manuscript come across my desk I would have returned it after the first 30 pages, if even that far.

Why? I’m about to get into that.

Weedon attempts to create a world in which women are utterly subjugated. Her shrill, misandristic story utterly fails in its message, and was better, and brilliantly done by Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale.

You will often read me bang on about research, credibility, plausibility, world-building, and character development. All of these elements are essential to craft an excellent story, and all of these elements are deficient or absent in Weedon’s debut novel.

Let’s start with the warrens Weedon creates for the Unmales (women, and what a ridiculous term in my view) to inhabit. These warrens, sapped beneath the citadel where the Autokrator — the head of the totalitarian/parliamentary political regime of the story — resides, are carved out of what Weedon repeatedly describes as soft earth, completely unlit.

There are two engineering problems immediately apparent in that creation: soft earth requires some form of shoring to prevent cave-ins. There is none in the novel. And an underground habitation without light is problematic when the women who live there are the grunt labour of the citadel. Trying to carry goods, even by wheelbarrow, through cramped, unlit, unsupported tunnels just doesn’t make any logical sense.

And where are the ventilation shafts? That requirement for ventilation becomes even more apparent when Weedon sets many of her scenes in the underground bakery which seems to operate non-stop, fired by wood, a bakery which supplies the majority of the bread for the above-ground male population.

How are they getting all that wood underground? How are those ovens operating when there is no air to draw or vent? How is all that flour delivered? That latter seems to be handled peripherally in the story by the head of the bakery who daily goes above ground to acquire whatever flour she can find, and brings it back down by wheelbarrow. That’s a lot of flour. And then because baking bread (in the oven, over an open fire, in a Norse-style or clay oven) is something with which I am intimately familiar, I found myself gritting my teeth over the myriad inaccuracies in Weedon’s presentation. I started asking myself: how can they see to measure out ingredients? How are they leavening their bread? How are they keeping smoke from asphyxiating them? And on, and on, because just that one activity in the novel, which plays a key role, is so egregiously wrong that it infects everything else.

The inaccuracies in just those items comes as a surprise given Weedon alleges to have been raised on a back-to-the-land, subsistence farm.

There’s the scene where one of the characters is cleaning ash from a fireplace in high-ranking individual’s hearth, accessed by a leather-curtained hatch in the warrens. My first thought was: leather curtain at the back of a fireplace? How does that not burn? And then the character accidentally spills ash out into the main room. Weedon describes it as soot. The character enters the room through a servant’s leather curtain (I really don’t understand Weedon’s fascination with leather coverings) in order to clean up the mess, and then describes wiping up the soot with a cloth so that no one knows of the accident. Now, if it’s soot that’s being cleaned, it won’t just wipe away. Soot is greasy. It’s used in making pigment for inks and dyes, as well as paint. Ash, however, is grey, powdery, and can indeed be removed with a  brush or damp cloth.

Then let’s discuss the ‘shawls’ the Unmales wear to cover their faces. In the use of these shawls it would appear they’re worn not unlike a burqa. A shawl, however, is a triangular or rectangular piece of cloth, and were one to wear it to cover the entire face, you’d have to fasten or tie it to prevent it from slipping off, and the weave would have to be relatively thin in order to allow for visibility. That is unlike a burqa which is designed to fit around the head, and which has a mesh screen, or eye-slit, built into the garment to allow the wearer to be able to see where they’re going. So, the use of a shawl just doesn’t make sense. And Weedon seems to have an abundance of spare shawls hung at every access door of the warrens, which is remarkable in itself given these women live in utter indigence.

How do these women bathe? There is no mention of running water, or water being brought down to the warrens. If the women don’t bathe, there must be a proliferation of every kind of skin disease, lice and other infestations. How are they handling their monthly cycles without the means to clean themselves?

How do they clothe themselves? There’s no mention of textile or garment manufacture for women in the warrens, and given this misogynistic society Weedon has created, it would be impossible for a woman to purchase fabric or ready-made garments above ground.

The women sleep in niches carved out with their hands from the dirt. If that’s so, then what prevents those niches from collapsing, especially in light of the fact the niches are stacked one atop the other.

And these are just the most egregious of the material culture problems in the novel. There are more. The novel is rife with them.

Let us move on to character development. There is none. What is presented are flat outlines of individuals, not unlike what one might encounter in a screenplay. I thought this before I ever knew Weedon is primarily a screenplay writer. Once I had that information, the lack of character development made sense. That writing skill isn’t in her lexicon.

And once you are aware of that, it then makes sense that the environmental details she creates, or rather doesn’t create, also fall into place. There is no weather. There is no sense of hot or cold, sun or cloud, when the women venture out from the warrens. It’s rather green screen.

What there is a great deal of description about is the gender modification one female character undergoes in order to pass herself off as Male, and thereby rise through the political ranks.

Which brings me to the improbability of that particular character becoming the doppelganger of a young man who dies in an equestrian accident. She utterly assumes his role, even to the point of travelling home to meet with her father who is a man of standing. Quite miraculously she’s accepted. Which, for me, just reinforced the incredulity of the story.

Then there’s the role of the Consort, a male heir, who is required to dress in ‘women’s weeds’, so, essentially, to spend his life-in-waiting as a transgender individual. But that raises the question: if this is a male-dominated society which is utterly misogynistic, a society in which Unmales are loathed, then why is the male heir dressed as a woman? Again, it just doesn’t make any logical sense.

By the end of the story, this phallic-obsessed society masturbates its way into an ideological civil war. Even the women get involved. The conservative male faction who want to exist and procreate without any females, in fact wish to eradicate all Unmales, set about killing women and the men who do not support their radical views. The liberal males kill the conservative males. The women kill everyone. There’s a lot of killing. It’s almost like Titus Andronicus. And then they stop. A liberal male takes the role of Autokrator, an individual who has been fed a slow poison most of his life, and then names as his heir and consort the Unmale he has secretly loved for years. He dies. The Unmale takes power. Her tenure is even shorter. And what happens after that, is, well, not really quite known.

And I was left not really quite caring. Just glad it was over.

Should you read Autokrator? Probably, if you like misandristic, shrill, and not particularly well-written novels. Art is subjective.