What Doesn’t Kill Us by Ajay Close may shock you to the core

 Saraband, £10.99

IF you’re a man, read this book. If you’re a woman, get every man you know to read this book. In short: men need to read this book.

Ajay Close’s latest novel What Doesn’t Kill Us is about women, but it’s men who will benefit from spending time within its covers - though that journey may not always be an easy experience for male readers.

The novel is set against a very loosely fictionalised backdrop of the Yorkshire Ripper murders. It drips with misogyny. Close, a Scottish novelist, makes Life on Mars seem feminist.

The story centres on Liz, a police officer attached to the Ripper Squad, or in this case the Butcher Squad; the killer’s tabloid moniker gets tweaked.

Liz is beset by revolting sexist colleagues and a brutish, violent partner. Midway through her time on the Butcher Squad, Liz moves into a house run by young feminists.

There’s a whole gamut of women in this collective - former sex workers, middle-class Bohemians, young black women, working class women, and Liz who’s hiding her identity as a cop from her new radical friends.

The book took me back to memories of the Ripper stalking northern England when I was a child in the 1970s. I remember watching Reclaim the Night marches on the news when women took to the streets - like Liz and her friends - protesting not just the Ripper, but all male violence.

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Don’t forget the response to the Ripper murders by police was to tell women not to go out after dark unaccompanied. Reclaim the Night spat in the face of such paternalistic misogyny.

So far, so recent history. Matters change, though, when a character called Rowena arrives at the women’s home. Rowena comes from money. She’s part of that 1970’s ‘radical chic’ movement, when wealthy poseurs idolised young terrorists like the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Rowena wants to violently escalate the way the women respond to the murders.

It’s at this stage that the book starts to become deeply unsettling for male readers. Not only are there no - zero, nada, zilch - male characters in the book who are even halfway decent, a real sense of hatred towards men starts to the fill pages when Rowena is around.

I read this book at the same time as my two twenty-something daughters, both of whom are feminist to their core. Over dinner one night they pondered what most men would make of the book given just how irredeemably rotten every man is within its pages.

To me, though, the anger towards men makes literary sense. It’s entirely understandable. The Ripper murders were, in effect, an act of prolonged terrorism towards all women. For millennia, women were dominated and victimised. The Ripper murders were like a ghastly festival of that historic violence; the apotheosis of oppression.

And what does terrorism do to the terrorised? Terrorism can sometimes radicalise the victim. I’ve covered terrorism around the world as a writer for more than 30 years. One dreadful side-effect - perhaps the principle side-effect the terrorist prays for - is that some victims start responding with rage, extremism, violence and hatred themselves.

September 11 (Image: free)

Think of America and how it behaved after the September 11 attacks. The victim became radicalised and carried out acts of extreme vengeance.

So it is with Rowena. Her hatred for men becomes almost absurd. She’s enraged that there’s a male cat in the women’s shared house. A little boy in the house should be put into care, she believes, as no man can be in her presence. Rowena calls him a “little f****r”.

Simply being a woman in this world has damaged Rowena to such as extent that she’s lost all sense of proportion and morality.

However, it’s a flaw in the book that there are simply no good - or even passable - male characters. But, let’s be honest, men have been writing books with no decent female characters for centuries. Maybe Close is engaged in some literary payback?

There’s a contempt for the very physicality of men in this novel - a similar contempt that’s existed in male writing down the years. Here, though, the female gaze is disgusted rather than titillated.

All men are pigs in this world, incapable of even keeping themselves clean; they have “pubic sideburns”; “giblets” hang between their legs.

This is uncomfortable reading - certainly for men, and one would imagine for most women. Nobody wants to be the target of hate, or to be a bystander to hate. But if the point being made is that men have denigrated and humiliated women without limit for centuries, then it certainly hits home.

The message to male readers is this: it’s wearying listening to yourself being described as scum, isn’t it? So imagine what it’s been like for women endlessly described as ‘bitches’.

It’s a neat little exercise in empathy - though through the darkest metaphor possible: serial murder.

Much of this territory, however, has been well-trodden of late. The TV drama The Long Shadow was a feminist retelling of the Ripper murders. The BBC documentary A Very British Crime Story, about the Ripper, also focused on the gross misogyny that wasn’t just the motivation for the crimes, but part and parcel of the police investigation, the media coverage and the response from society at large.

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So Close isn’t doing anything hugely new in this book. For a really fresh take on British history, violent crime and feminism read The Five by Hallie Rubenhold, which gives full voice to the women killed by Jack the Ripper in 1888.

It’s an astonishing social history and overturns the tawdry notion that the killer only targeted sex workers. Contrary to received wisdom, Rubenhold established that just two of Jack the Ripper’s victims were sex workers.

Like the Yorkshire Ripper, Jack the Ripper simply hated all women and all women were his targets. It just happened to be that sex workers were easier to kill.

Close’s novel, despite its material, can be very funny. She’s not afraid to mock po-faced, radical extremism.

Where her book is in a class of its own, though, is as a parable about the way terrorism works, and how women have been subjected to terror at the hands of men for so long that it is understandable if some become radicalised and chose to hate and respond with cruelty themselves.