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Biographical note: Elizabeth Baines was born in South Wales and lives in Manchester. Salt previously published two acclaimed books by Elizabeth, her collection of short stories, Balancing on the Edge of the World (2007) and her novel Too Many Magpies (2009). Elizabeth is a prizewinning radio playwright and she has also written short plays for stage. She is also a performer and has been a teacher.
BIC Basic
EAN13: 9781844717972
ISBN: 9781844717972
Author: Elizabeth Baines
Title: The Birth Machine
Series: Salt Modern Fiction
Product class: BC
Language: eng
Audience: General/trade
BIC subject category: F
Publisher: Salt Publishing
Pub date: 01-Oct-10
Extent: 160pp
Height: 198 mm
Width: 129 mm
Thickness: 12 mm
Weight: 240 gms
Supplier: Gardners Books
Supplier: Ingram Book Group
Supplier: Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability: NP
Price: GBP 8.99
Price: USD 15.95
Rights: World
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description/annotation: As Zelda labours in childbirth, she sinks into a surreal world where the past blends with the present, and facts become merged with fairytale and myth. The long-awaited reissue of the groundbreaking eighties novel which exposed a woman’s experience of hi-tech childbirth and tells a gripping story of a long-ago murder and present-day betrayals.
Main description: Zelda is about to give birth to her baby, tucked up on the ward and secure in the latest technology. But things don’t go to plan, and as her labour progresses and the drugs take over, Zelda enters a surreal world. Here past and present become confused and blend with fairytale and myth, and secrets threaten to leak from the long-gone past and finally give birth to disturbing revelations in the present. Originally published in the eighties, The Birth Machine was seized on by readers as giving voice to a female experience absent from fiction until then. It was acclaimed as a significant event in women’s publishing and quickly became a classic text. Out of print for some years, The Birth Machine is now reissued in a revised version (which first appeared in 1996). Still very relevant today to modern Obstetrics and Medicine, The Birth Machine is however more than that: it is also a gripping story of buried secrets and a long-ago murder, and of present-day betrayals. Above all, it is a powerful novel about the ways we can wield power through logic and language, and about the battle over who owns the right to knowledge and the power to tell the stories of who we are.
Table of contents:
The Birth Machine
Author’s Note View excerpt as PDF:  Click here to view a sample ( KB)
Excerpt from book:
Author’s Note
In spite of the ‘death of the author’, no novel gets written without a novelist’s strong intention, and my intention when I wrote The Birth Machine in 1982 was to tell a story exploring the hubris of much contemporary ‘scientific’ thinking. In particular, I was interested in the contemporary tendency to overlook, or even deny, the factor of uncertainty. In the background were the pronouncements of politicians and ‘scientists’ with vested interests that there was no proof of any link between the nuclear power station at Sellafield and the cancer clusters nearby – overlooking the point that there was no proof of no link, either – and their conclusion that therefore we could be confident that there was no danger, rather than the more logical one that we could not make any pronouncements about the level or likelihood of danger, and therefore ought to be careful, in case (a lack of logic applied now to BSE); the arrogance of the nuclear industry in general and of the space race (the Chernobyl and Challenger disasters waiting to happen); travesties like Thalidomide already acknowledged in our socio-pharmacological history.
Obstetrics was especially apt as a context for my theme: it is in the moments of birth that the line between burgeoning life and proximate death is at its fuzziest, and, in the contemporary high-tech set-up, so-called scientific objectivity and personal subjectivity most strikingly in conflict.
The original version of The Birth Machine, as it appears in this edition, is specifically structured to establish, in the opening chapters, the last of these concerns – the problematic conflict between scientific ‘objectivity’ and personal subjectivity. Chapter One begins with the famous Professor, the supposed carrier of scientific objectivity, addressing a conference. The setting is deliberately international, far removed in geography and glamour from the hospital bed to which we will eventually be taken. We witness the effect of the Professor’s charisma, and thus his influence; we follow briefly his hectic dash back across the Atlantic, his lordly sweep through his secretary’s office and on to the ward where the students await him. The woman on the bed is seen by us through the eyes of the students, as an object in his virtuoso demonstration. While the whole is undercut by satire, and a questioning of the authority of the Professor thus prompted, the only world we are in any way invited to share is that of the medical profession, and the very mode of satire implicates the reader in a stance of superiority and detachment.
At the end of Chapter One a new viewpoint and tone are signalled, and the opening of Chapter Two takes us into a contrasting world: the childhood memories of Zelda, the woman lying on the bed – triggered, ironically, by the way the nurses treat her like a child.
But this is yet another displacement. It is not until Chapter Four that we are presented with the cold reality of Zelda’s subjective experience of the initial procedures of obstetric induction.
This structure is intended to wean the reader (and in particular the unwilling or squeamish reader) gradually from the safety of ‘objectivity’, via a growing familiarity with Zelda through her memories, to the shock of her subjectivity – though even then her experience is presented as flashback, in third-person past tense: Zelda herself, leave alone the reader, can only contemplate it at a distance. There is a further, more important, intention: to demonstrate, via these perspective shifts, the shocking temptations for all of us in the glamour of detachment.
Katy Campbell, reviewing the first edition in City Limits, declared the book ‘especially recommended for anyone involved in the Obstetrics industry.’ Since Obstetrics was (and still is) dominated by men, it is ironic, therefore, that the publisher prepared in 1983 to take on such a novel was publishing for women. For The Women’s Press edition the chapter confronting us with Zelda’s subjective experience (here appearing as Chapter Four) was moved to the beginning. Since readers were not expected to be male, the suasive tactics of my earlier structure were judged unnecessary, and a beginning with which women readers could identify was thought more desirable. This change necessitated, structurally, another change: from past to present tense within the chapter, increasing further its immediacy.
In the end it’s not for me, as the writer, to say which version is better, or whether either version fulfils completely the authorial/editorial intention behind its creation, and whether indeed it matters if it doesn’t – all this has to be up to readers. I do believe, however, that they are different books, with different meanings. What we read first in any piece of work filters what we read next (however differently each maverick reader reads), and I believe that the placing of the ‘subjective’ and non-satiric chapter at the start lent the whole a realist and ‘confessional’ slant, and it was this which prompted readings of the novel as a passionate plea for natural childbirth, rather than as the plea for logic I intend it to be.
ELIZABETH BAINES
Review quote: The first well-crafted and surreal novel from a talented new writer. Literary Review Review quote: A gripping story, a pithy book. Katy Campbell
City Limits Review quote: An increasingly powerful narrative … its presentation of the world of childhood contrasts nicely with sharp satire. Laura Marcus
Times Literary Supplement Review quote: In many ways this novel is the birth myth of our age Janet Madden Simpson
In Dubllin Review quote: Elizabeth Baines has a wry humour and satirical edge’ Martin Nicholls
City Life Review quote: This powerful book leaves you with a sense of disquiet, anger and frustration … that what you have just read is an everyday story about an everyday event. As such it is very clever. Jessica Corner
Everywoman Review quote: An odd novel, and very compelling. Head and Hands |
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