The Passion of New Eve was another book that I had to read for my Gender, Sex and Culture class for university. I’m normally a massive fan of Angela Carter’s writing but TPONE was a story that I just couldn’t wrap my head around.

*spoilers ahead*

New York has become the City of Dreadful Night where dissolute Leilah performs a dance of chaos for Evelyn. But this young Englishman’s fate lies in the arid desert, where a many-breasted fertility goddess will wield her scalpel to transform him into the new Eve.

The protagonist is a young man, Evelyn, who arrives in New York from England to take up a teaching post in a University, but New York is extremely violent, the University is in the control of armed men (armed black men to be specific, so presumably it is a racial uprising), so Evelyn has no job.

Evelyn meets a woman, Leilah, in a chemist, and follows her to her flat where they have a truncated relationship in which he abuses her and lives on her money until he gets her pregnant, organises an abortion, takes her hemorrhaging to a clinic, and flees from New York. Although originally intending to go to New Orleans, after the disaster of the abortion Evelyn heads instead into the desert, where the car runs out of petrol, and Evelyn, parched, waits to die.

“She had given herself to the world in her entirety and then found nothing was left”

― Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve

After that, Evelyn is captured for the first time (he is captured four times in all) and subjected to a sex change that makes him female (Eve) – not only do they look perfect, but they are able to reproduce. The second capture puts them in the control of a deranged man – Zero – who repeatedly rapes them and is OBSESSED with a movie star called Tristessa who Eve is also obsessed with. Zero, his followers and Eve, and meet the old movie star whereupon they discovers that this movie star is a transvestite. Eve falls in love with him/her. Eve has one night of love with Tristessa and becomes pregnant. Eve is then captured again, and Eve’s capturers kill Tristessa. Eve them escapes for a brief period of freedom, before they are again captured, this time by Leilah, now a freedom fighter in a war torn California – most of which has fallen in the sea – and taken to a safe place to have they’re baby.

Part of me really wanted to love this book because it was written by Carter and it because it explores important themes of sexuality. However, I couldn’t seem to understand what the hell was going on half of the time, I had to keep making notes on each chapter as to what had happened. Part of me thinks that this book is important to study because of the themes that it explores, but I really don’t think that it was well written and I’m not even sure I’m glad that I’ve read it.

I found the book to be overly sexual, there was A LOT of rape and it made me very very uncomfortable – which I guess was kind of the point, but it was just too much. The ending was very ambiguous as well. I wasn’t really sure what was happening, whether it was a metaphor for something bigger or whether it was just what it said. But I do think there was definitely something bigger going on.

I ended up writing a 3000 word essay on this book and how gender is represented, so hopefully I get a good grade for it! It’s a real big shame that I didn’t like the book though…

Disclaimer: this book contains triggers for rape, sexual abuse, forced surgery, paedophilia and transphobia.