When pipelines bring water, not oil
Author’s debut subverts clichés to create a terrifying and believable ‘cli-fi’ novel “Watershed,” by Doreen Vanderstoop, Freehand Books, 360 pages, $22.95
“Watershed,” the debut novel from Calgary writer Doreen Vanderstoop, begins in mid-disaster. It’s 2058 and, after the “deluge decade” of the 2020s, during which the glaciers melted and sea levels rose, Alberta is locked in a crippling drought.
The novel is an example of the fledgling climate change fiction genre (cli-fi), and explores the effects of environmental collapse on the people and communities of western Canada. It’s a new dust bowl, with no end in sight, and complicating factors such as Valley Fever, an airborne fungal disease, which has “migrated north from Arizona,” with catastrophic effect.
The people of southern Alberta are waiting with bated breath for the arrival of a pipeline, transporting desalinated water from the Pacific, while a terrorist group, the Northern Water Alliance, seeks to halt its progress, concerned that the pipeline will deprive northern Alberta of its share.
Against this backdrop, Willa Van Bruggen is struggling to keep herself, her family, and her farm alive.
Willa has spent her entire life on the family farm, first with her father, now with her husband Calvin. Her mother and younger sister decamped to Calgary, unsuited to farm life, and now her son Daniel isn’t coming home after completing his education, instead taking a job with Crystel Canada, the crown corporation tasked with water distribution. The farm is barely surviving, despite having changed from beef to goats when water began to grow scarce, and debt is choking them. Worse, Willa has begun having hallucinations, terrifying visions of an armoured tank tearing through the farm’s fence, or of a snake winding around her teacup (for starters).
Vanderstoop skilfully balances the political and social aspects of the novel with the personal and familial, creating a vivid portrait of lives eking out an existence against all odds, of people coming to terms with both the past and the unimaginable future. When Daniel’s new employer tasks him with serving on a series of town meetings — to win over pipeline doubters in the south — Vanderstoop is able to convincingly evoke small-town mistrust and wariness, the caution of those pushed to their extremes.
While “Watershed” wobbles occasionally — the early stages of the book are exposition-heavy (as one might expect from such a detailed vision of the future), the dialogue slips into staginess and speechifying a bit too often, and developments late in the book, and their resolutions, may challenge the suspension of disbelief — one can easily accept these as the signs of a debut novelist, especially since the novel as a whole is powerful and thought-provoking.
The book is based on a powerful balancing act, embracing CanLit clichés — struggling to save the family farm, the wayward son — while simultaneously subverting them in light of environmental devastation, a world where even the sky has changed, to a “beautiful, terrible, celestial raspberry coloured by dust and by smoke drifting in from forest fires in northern Washington state and British Columbia.”
Vanderstoop’s dystopia is terrifyingly realistic (and, some would say, inevitable), while the respective journeys of Willa and the members of her family ring emotionally true, and will feel familiar to most readers.