The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Dystopian novel envisions war of sexes
“What must it be like, to live in a world that wants to kill you?”
This question, posed by one of the characters in “The Water Cure,” the debut novel by Welsh writer Sophie Mackintosh, seems to express the inspiration of a whole generation of women writers, the literary granddaughters of Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter, who have recently been mesmerizing readers with stories of dystopian futures fueled by climate change, pollution, pandemics and patriarchal politics.
In “The Water Cure,” which was on the longlist for the 2018 Man Booker Prize, masculinity and femininity are explicitly pitted against each other — the toxic climate and savage culture of men has burgeoned unchecked, creating an environment in which women can barely survive.
A man named King attempts to protect his family by removing them to an isolated island on the other side of a poisoned sea. On a run-down estate, he and his wife have raised three girls, Grace, Lia and Sky. King and Mother regularly administer a “water cure” and other sadistic therapies to toughen and protect their daughters, and also receive parties of withered women from the mainland coming in search of these treatments.
The refugees are invited to write their stories in a Welcome Book, which contains “reason after reason after reason. Testament of how men hurt women. Testament of the old world.”
These entries appear at brief intervals throughout the main narrative, which is essentially a psychological thriller about what happens to the family after King disappears, then is presumed dead.
Not long after King disappears, two men and a boy wash ashore. Lia says: “Emergency has always been with us; if not present emergency then always the idea that it is coming. … And here, finally, is the emergency we’ve been waiting for all our lives.”
As the emotional economy of the island shifts to include the visitors, sexual longings and sibling rivalries bloom amid increasing toxicity and violence. “Part of what made the old world so terrible, so prone to destruction, was a total lack of preparation for the personal energies often called feelings,” Lia observes. “Especially dangerous for women, our bodies already so vulnerable in ways that the bodies of men are not.” Despite the near-tortures the girls have endured to cauterize such energies, they quickly burst forth.
By definition, a dystopian novel can’t really have a happy ending. But Mackintosh’s profound faith in sisterhood imbues her particular dark vision with beauty and a kind of hope.