THE WATER CURE by Sophie Mackintosh
I was intrigued when I first saw an email from NetGalley inviting me to read this book. Could it be the same Sophie Mackintosh I once met at her university, and performed with in a surreal, one-off performance of a play written by our friends and taking place in someone’s student accommodation? I have only vague memories of it and I doubt Sophie remembers at all, but full disclosure: yep, same Sophie.
It seems apt, then, that when reading her debut novel The Water Cure, you feel as if you’re constantly hampered by a veil, a net curtain, something blocking you. You’re underwater perhaps, and everything’s a bit murky. Mackintosh arranges things exactly as she wants them, and you are granted knowledge only when she wants you to have it. There is no second-guessing of plot here. I shall talk very little about plot in this review because you do need to read it and unpeel the onion she creates for yourself. Take everything at face value, but be aware it might all fall away…
There are three sisters, this we know from fairly on. They are isolated and live with their mother and no other people. Their only contact is with each other. Their father left for the mainland some time ago – there are hints about toxins in the air, special preparations have to be made each time he leaves to get provisions – but he hasn’t come back. We don’t know what might have happened to the rest of the world to cause it to be so polluted, or why the island the sisters inhabit was somehow spared. It’s drummed in to us that men are bad, and only King (the name they use for the father) is to be trusted.
We learn that the unusually spacious accommodation the women seem to reside in was formerly some kind of shelter or sanctuary for women. It’s implied – nothing is concrete in this novel – that either the catastrophic event on the mainland stopped the women from coming, or that the shelter stopped serving its purpose. We don’t know.
The novel is divided in to various chapters, each headed usually by the name of one of the sisters, or we are to understand, in the third person. Seemingly interjected are notes from the mother, in italics. This was my understanding of how each voice was introduced and it may be wrong, but it added to the fluidity of the narrative. Nothing got stale as we see events from different perspectives. Everything we know is challenged and unreliable gatekeepers are, by the end, mostly discovered and clarified. I believe the novel ends neatly but not unrealistically so. The tale is told.
The novel is longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and the shortlist will be announced on 20/09/18.