Pure by Julianna Baggott

Previously published in Dawn Books & Authors. 

Julianna Baggott is a widely published novelist of over a dozen books. She writes under two different pseudonyms as well as under her own name, and has been published regularly in varying – and equally successful – genres. None of this matters, though, because her new book Pure, is of an entirely different breed altogether. Telling you that it’s a Young Adult future dystopia would be correct, albeit a gross simplification of a tack-sharp, multi-faceted cinematic adventure that’s just ripe for the film-making.  

Pure is very much a story of friendship, of loyalty and of survival of course, in a world ravaged by the ideas of a few brilliant, misguided scientists. It is also a moving story of loss, with a constant sense of something missing lurking around the corners of the narrative. Whether it’s a parent, a past, a personality, or people and humanity altered and removed from their natural place, there is a barbed, bitter sadness surrounding each of Baggottt’s characters, each dealing with their own personal voids. As with any good YA novel, there is a great deal of conflict here, a clear divide between the ‘Wretches’ who, like Pressia, have somehow survived ‘the Detonations’ in the city, and the ‘Pures’ who, like Partridge, are the fortunate few taken into the protection of the Dome, where they live a sanitary, controlled life while those outside struggle as best they can under the burden of survival. When these two characters meet, they find that they have more in common than anyone could ever have predicted.

Pure is written from multiple POVs, each as assured as the other, each holding its own personality clear. Pressia herself is a classic sympathetic teenage protagonist – she is tough, savvy, sensitive and even though she is human enough to waver in the face of comfort provided by the ‘wrong’ side, her moral compass is strong. Baggott is never ambivalent about whose side she wants her reader to be on, although this never makes her villainous characters boring. One protagonist wonders if the ‘evil’ scientists’ intentions really were all that evil: ‘without the Detonations, we’d have dwindled and finally clubbed ourselves to bright bloody death. So they speeded that up, right?’

Baggott’s vision of dystopia is original, current, undeniably grotesque – and all the better for it. In the world of Pure, there is talk of ‘the Detonations’, large bombs that destroyed the world as we know it now, but there has been no complete nuclear winter. The cocktail of bombs ‘disrupted molecular structures’ but nanotechnology included in the explosives caused cells to self-assemble with DNA, often fusing humans with the objects, organisms or landscape they happened to have been touching. Baggott’s premise for the future created in Pure stems from the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the effects of the atomic radiation on survivors. The hibakusha or ‘explosion-affected people’ include some whose bodies were imprinted with the images on the clothing they wore, as if their skin had fused with the patterns on the fabric. Whether nanotechnology is potentially able to fuse human cells with their surroundings in the way Pure describes or not is inconsequential – there is no need for a discussion on whether this is science or speculative fiction: like any great YA dystopia, it is close enough to reality to be truly interesting and believable. Whether its Pressia’s doll’s head fist, or the sheer body horror of paramilitary leader El Capitan’s younger brother fused into his back in a permanent piggy-back, the birds embedded in Bradwell’s back that flutter their wings under his shirt, or the ‘groupies’: clumsy drunken masses of multiple people whose flesh has meshed together - every instance of the grotesque is handled adroitly and the narrative is all the stronger for it.

While those in the city wear their scars on the outside, those inside the Dome are subjected to quite another type of forced posthuman evolution. Teenagers are ‘coded’ to enhance their physical abilities, instincts and intelligence. Partridge, as a classic rebellious protagonist stuck with the wrong side is trying to find why he is immune to the ‘coding’ he has been subjected to, but there are others who are not as fortunate as him. Eventually, the cruelty is not just in the methods, but also in the eventuality of the ‘coding’. The Dome’s ‘special’ troops are ‘both human and not human’. In a world where the idea of altering the human body into something more, something ‘better’ is already reality, Baggott very decidedly explores the implications of physical posthumanism. Whereas the Dome’s methods are always very clearly villainous, Baggott is gentler with those who altered their bodies to survive the world after the Detonations. Like posthuman cover girl Aimee Mullins and her incredible prosthetic ‘cheetah legs’, some of Baggott’s characters also adapt beautifully, aesthetically. Of one character, she writes, ‘someone built these arms and legs for her, the metal seams, the stitching in the leather straps, the covered bolts, the stippled design of the perforation. There’s delicacy, care, love that’s been poured into them.’

Baggott has said she began Pure by writing a fabulist story from which only a girl with a doll’s head for a fist survived to become Pressia. Pure owes a great deal to fables and to fairy tales, with a certain fairy tale gothic tonality, as well as with clear references to the swan princess and trails of breadcrumbs. There is a strong alignment to the fairy tale motif of children betrayed by one parent and wrenched away from the other: ‘I’ve spent my life missing you’, says one mother to her child. In Baggott’s world, as in fairy tales, it is up to the independent children to correct the mistakes of their parents, up to them to ‘fix’ the world their parents broke.

There is a deep, despairing ache in every mother Baggott creates in Pure, even those who are now closer than ever before to their children. Finally, here is a writer who tackles the question of how women protecting children will survive the apocalypse- jokes about children holding you back have been made for years now, particularly with the recent spate of zombie scenarios in contemporary fiction, but in Pure’s post-nuclear fusing, mothers are the strongest survivors, and perhaps the most grotesque. In a frightening reveal, two of the protagonists meet the ‘Mothers of the Meltlands’ – women whose only thought was to protect their children at the time of the Detonations in an area that was once a suburb and is now recognized by the large globs of colourful plastic and metal: what were once play areas that melted flat onto the earth. They are now, as then, deeply connected to their children. Except that they now share flesh as well. Of one, Baggott writes, ‘…all that is left of her child, just an infant, the purples lips, the dark mouth embedded in her upper arm, still alive, breathing.’

Pure is the first of a planned trilogy, and the film rights were sold to Fox 2000 before the book’s official release date. With the recent resurgence of YA fiction as a vital part of the publishing and film industries, there is no doubt that Pure will be a big deal. If handed over to the likes of Terry Gilliam who is not afraid to play with the grotesque, this could be a startling film – just as it is a startling novel.