The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh first caught my attention when I read an interview with her about the book. First of all, as you know by now, I can't resist a juicy dystopia - and what started out as sci-fi and evolved into a carefully crafted, masterful and unique story was sure to be of my liking.
In the interview, Sophie said "there was something buried in between all the focus on survivalism and disaster, moments of strangeness that I wanted to pry open". So I was expecting subtlety, lurking emotions and goals, a sort of mystery hidden in the pages. I was not disappointed, to say the least - and clearly, the judging panel of the Man Booker Prize wasn't either.
The Water Cure tells the story of a family: King and Mother, and three sisters: Grace, Lia and Sky. They live isolated from a world overrun with toxins and poisonous air; a world filled with dangers, especially to women. The parents exercise daily treatments on the girls to help them prepare for the inevitable coming of 'the men': love therapy, ice bucket therapy, sleeping therapy. Then one day, King disappears and three men wash up on the shore shortly after: the dynamics begin to shift, and with it everything the girls have ever known.
What did I like about it?
This is the year of striking debut novels, I swear. But this book stands out. First of all: the idea itself. Again, in a publishing world slowly being overpowered by feminist dystopias, Sophie has created a story, a world that is incomparable to anything I've ever read. Nothing is certain; nothing is real, nor fake. The way the story is told - through the viewpoints of the sisters - keeps the reader at arm's length, never confirming nor denying. We can't trust anyone's narrative: not the parents, not the sisters, not the men who arrive to their world. Along with the girls, we feel constantly threatened.
The language. The sheer power of simplicity. A completely random example (but I could have picked any page):
"I have gone days, weeks, without touch and when that happens I can feel my skin thinning, I have to lay my body against grass and velvet and the corner of the sofa and rub my hands and elbows and thighs against anything until they are raw."
Without over-complicating things, there is so much in each sentence that they're bursting at the seams. I read this book slowly, savoring every paragraph, often re-reading them as I went along. A single sentence would create a knot in my stomach. This is prose at its best.
Then, a third point (although I could keep going): the mystery of it all. The atmosphere is so tense that I never let my guard down; and as I slowly began to understand the world I was entering, I was always hungry to know more. The why, mostly. This is a book that kept me asking questions. Why did King decide to leave? What happened to the damaged women once they left the house? What lies beyond the barrier?... And it keeps me asking questions, days after having finished it.
What was I not massively fond of?
Very rarely, there would be a word that felt out of place - one specific example for me: "Yes, they do, but then what's new, I long to hiss back." I felt that King and Mother wouldn't use an expression like that, and because they're all the girls ever knew, Lia wouldn't use something like this either. Sometimes the swearing also felt out of place, but when I think about it, it didn't - this they could have picked up from the parents, and for every hidden emotion and repressed fit of anger, the girls would need words to let it out.
Something that kept me wondering was what the ultimate aim of the parents might have been. They aimed to create a utopia (a "failed utopia" perhaps, as Mother muses once), but what is the utopia in this case? This is a book where many minds and aims mingle, creating an intricate web of human emotions that we are all - reader and characters - trying to navigate. It is confusing, but in the best sense of the word. Truly human. (I ended up praising instead of criticising, didn't I.)
Perhaps another thing I wondered about is why, in the middle section, we only see things from Lia's point of view, while in the beginning and end we often hear Grace and also the three girls, collectively. I feel that Grace would have been just as striking to understand in the main section of the book - but then I also imagine that Sophie is giving us a kind of freedom. We flow along with Lia, almost as a test; and then receive Grace's judgement in the end, telling us how we fared in her opinion.
Overall...
A stunning debut of a novel. The words that spring to mind are chilling, quiet, subtle, haunting. Unnerving.
I could write many pages about The Water Cure, thinking over its message, where its power lies, delving into the emotions and thoughts. I foresee PhDs on this book, critical essays and talks. It will be analysed from a perspective of female power and parental attachment; about male-female relationships and siblings. About the use of language and its evocative power.
Probably also about Sophie Mackintosh, who burst onto the scene with a masterful novel and went on to write similarly stunning things.
9/10
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