Blue Ticket: A Novel & The Two Tickets

Image credit Penguin.

Book: Blue Ticket

If you were a Blue-Ticket your life could change at any time, you could make it change at any time, and we were alternately complacent and anxious about possibilities contained within that freedom.

In Blue Ticket, Sophie Mackintosh’s sophomore novel, women are denied the freedom to choose the direction their lives will take. In a dystopian setting different from the one found in her first novel, The Water Cure (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize), women are sent to government buildings after their first period and assigned a ticket that determines the arc their futures will take: White Ticket women can only be mothers while Blue Tickets can be anything but. Calla, the protagonist, is assigned a blue ticket but, after many years of working as a chemist, drinking, smoking, and noncommittal sex, she feels the need for something more. She decides to have a child which, for blue ticket women like herself, is against the law and will cost her everything. Still, she decides that she must, and with pliers and the help of vodka removes her IUD. Once the inevitable happens and Calla becomes pregnant, she’s given the choice to let her government mandated doctor abort the child so she can return to her life as a blue ticket or to make a run for it—to take the government issued survival bag and to make the most of her 12-hour head start towards the border of another country where, presumably, there are no ticketed limitations. The journey begins then, when Calla climbs into her car, a few months pregnant, and watches in the rearview as the people she’s known most of her life swarm into her apartment and destroy everything, leaving her nothing to return to.

Sometimes I became aware that there was somewhere I could not go. And I wanted to go there.

Blue Ticket is an allegorical story that reflects the western world’s perception of women back on itself. It’s a book about choice and autonomy, about body politics. It calls to attention in stark, unapologetic ways, how the bodies of women are rarely their own and subject to the laws of nations, geographical and educational limitations, and the desires of others. And because the novel is an allegory the characters who populate it are awful at nearly every turn. Selfish and shallow, they are meant to clearly illustrate a conflict that Mackintosh weaves from the fear and frustrations expressed by women in our world, made plangent against the dystopian setting of Blue Ticket. The most frightening thing about the novel is that it isn’t too far of a reach given the political climate of 2020: the government restrictions and mandates regarding women and their bodies; the deluge of government sponsored misinformation wholly removed from science; and a persistent culture of guilt assisted by gas-lighting officials, public servants, and third-party cronyism. Good luck separating reality from this fiction.

The writing in the novel is neat and sharp, very near to austere while still holding the clenched fist of passion within every line, a definite change from The Water Cure that was itself like water, flowing in many directions at once (as one would expect from a novel that moves between perspectives). Blue Ticket has such a tense, taught voice that you can feel Calla’s burdens as imminent facts, little reminders as she flees from town to town on her way north. The beginning has an ethereal, dream-like quality necessary to dystopian fiction, as the world is different and we’re just then waking to it and grasping at every small detail until firmly grounded in a world where women’s futures, and their bodies, are dictated and controlled. There are a few plot shifts in the narrative that feel sudden, with a slight lag near the end before the major (and satisfying) turn towards conclusion. The epilogue, though, feels like an afterthought added to give the ending a rosier hue. Still, I eagerly burned through this book.

There are a lot of interesting formal choices happening in the book as well, and I found the lack of quotation marks for speech interesting and integral, along with the left justification of every indentless and uniformly separated paragraphs; these are conventions to writing that we’re familiar with, that we don’t question when we see them, that are suddenly apparent when changed. Mackintosh has decided to subvert and ignore these conventions, and not without purpose. The story feels tighter, closer, thought and speech, time and place, narration and description, all swaddled near to the reader, to Calla, in a way that feels intimate and unsettling at the same time, a necessary constant for a story heavily themed on choice and retaking control.

When I thought about burning my life to the ground, which I was thinking about increasingly often, I wondered whether there were White-Ticket women who wanted to burn theirs to the ground too.

The best aspect of Blue Ticket is that it doesn’t preach and it’s not meant to be a condemning treaty about body politics. It’s good, literary fiction, driven by characters in a recognizable way. Body politics are, of course, present and necessary to the story as a whole, undeniably echoed in the events of our real lives, but it’s there in service of the story first. After all, this is a work of fiction, and I found myself eager to see where the story went and happy to go. I was invested in Calla and her voice, her very understandable desire for something more, something beyond what’s given to her, which, of course, is the main thread in this story. Desire, a need for a greater purpose. To feel that you’ve chosen what’s right for your life—that’s what’s at the bottom of Blue Ticket. And if you can empathize with Calla’s calling, and you understand the very real hindrances in our world keeping you, or those you care for, from a sense of fulfillment, then you’re not far from sympathizing with other people being denied their choice and autonomy. Because who hasn’t felt that urgent call, the clawing, hungry need for purpose? Which of us has felt bitter having to ignore it because we were afraid to lose what little we have? And who amongst us listened, took that first step, and never looked back?

Cocktails: The Two Tickets

We lined up, waiting to pull our tickets from the machine, the way you would take your number at the butcher's counter. The music popular that year played from speakers on the ceiling. Just gravity enough. Not necessarily such an important thing, after all.

The power of choice is a gift, so I wanted to present a pair of cocktails that readers and drinkers could choose from to fit their needs. One is a proper and potent spirited cocktail while the other is a non-alcoholic mocktail, named Blue Ticket and White Ticket, respectively (obviously).

Recipe: Blue Ticket

1.5oz Gin (I used Empress 1908, which gave it the blue color)
0.75oz Lillet Blanc
0.75oz Salers Aperitif
1 Teaspoon/Bar Spoon White Creme de Cacao
1oz Aquafaba*

1. Add all ingredients except the Aquafaba to a shaker tin, then add your ice.

2. Shake for 10 to 15 seconds then strain into the other half of the shaking tin; dump the ice.

3. Add the Aquafaba and shake for 15 seconds, then strain into a coupe or martini glass.

4. You can add a few drops of butterfly pea-flower tea to the foam and pull a toothpick through it to decorate.

5. Sip and then flee from the patriarchy.

Notes: Aquafaba is the liquid from a can of garbanzo beans that’s rich with protein and acts as an egg white substitute in cocktails. It doesn’t add any “bean” flavor, only a velvety texture and volume; it also mellows the flavor of a drink. If you want to omit the Aquafaba, you can use half of a large egg white, or instead add 0.5oz of Lemon Juice (or Camomile Champagne Acid, below). You can use any gin you prefer, Empress 1908 is all about the color and is otherwise a London Dry Gin.

Recipe: White Ticket

1.5oz Seedlip Grove 42 or Spice 94
0.75oz Robust Camomile Tea (double steeped)
0.75oz Pear Juice
0.5oz Camomile Champagne Acid* (or Lemon Juice)
0.5oz Pear Gomme Syrup** (or Simple Syrup)
1oz Aquafaba
6 dashes Fee Brothers Old Fashioned Bitters (these are Non-Alcoholic)

1. Add all ingredients except the Aquafaba to a shaker tin, then add your ice.

2. Shake for 10 to 15 seconds then strain into the other half of the shaking tin; dump the ice.

3. Add the Aquafaba and shake for 15 seconds, then strain into a coupe or martini glass.

4. You can add a few drops of Fee Brothers Old Fashioned Bitters to the foam and pull a toothpick through it to decorate. (Fee Brothers Bitters uses glycerine to extract flavor for their bitters and not alcohol, so all of their flavors are non-alcoholic. Add ‘em to your coffee, your kids’ OJ—it’s totally legit!)

5. Sip and relax.

Notes: Seedlip is a distilled but non-alcoholic “spirit” that adds a lot of flavor and nuance to a mocktail, giving it the semblance and flavor of something you might order in a bar. You could omit this and still have a sweet but shallow sipper; or you could replace the Seedlip with an aged rum or rye whiskey.

*Camomile Champagne Bitters: add 3g Lactic Acid (powdered) and 3g Tartaric Acid to 94g of warm, double-steeped Camomile Tea and stir until dissolved. The lactic and tartaric acids mimic the acidity of champagne, and give the cocktail lift.

**Pear Gomme Syrup: add 4Tbls of Gum Arabic to 2oz of near-boiling Pear Juice and stir until mostly combined; allow to sit for 2-3 hours. After waiting, make a syrup with 8oz of pear juice and 6oz of white sugar; do not boil the syrup but make sure the sugar is dissolved. After the sugar is dissolved, stir in the pear-gum arabic mixture until combined. Bottle and keep refrigerated for up to four weeks. Gomme Syrup adds texture and body to a cocktail, and this syrup goes well in tea, or in classic daiquiris or Bourbon old fashioneds.