Clarissa's Blog

I wanted to post this quote from Bothelford’s Gone. In this scene, Jack, a teenage British boy, visits a local abortion clinic:

Jack felt like he was visiting a foreign dictatorship with grey but clean streets, and that he had gone and entered the massive prison system that enabled those streets to remain clean in the first place. This clinic, Jack felt, was the place that ultimately made all the club nights in Bothelford possible, all the accidental products of one-night stands, marriages, and other sexual pairings, followed by more play, more partying, rather than an accounting of sorts. It was interesting in its own way. How would he put it if he had to give a presentation on it in class? The clinic was a secondary contraception in case the pills, condoms, and IUDs failed. The disintegrating sense of fun that the bars and nightclubs bred instead of children relied on the of this bland, hidden core. It was filled with unhappy people and, supposedly, a few rooms above, all kinds of surgical tools.

Edward McLaren, Bothelford’s Gone

Just so you are prepared, this is one of the lighter, less emotionally draining part of the novel. Not because there’s anything cute about the industrial-scale abortioneering it describes but because the rest is even harsher.