ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

If dystopian fiction is your thing, Roanna McClelland’s debut novel The Comforting Weight of Water is one of the most extreme I’ve come across.

This is the blurb:

In a near future where it never stops raining, a young adolescent runs wild. With only the cantankerous Gammy and a band of terrified and broken villagers for company, this story explores coming of age when society – and all its cues – has been washed away. For the few survivors, questions of identity, nature, love, and fear are explored through the eyes of a child, against a backdrop of encroaching water.

The novel is set in an unrecognisable world. Cities, towns, infrastructure, whole populations and all the mammals have been washed away under a torrent of endless rain, broken by only a very short period of sunlight each day.  The river is inexorably rising.  It widens, it breaks its banks, and the few remaining humans have to abandon their pitiful habitations once again and seek somewhere else on higher ground.  They have only a few rudimentary tools that rust a little more each day because there is nowhere that is really dry, not even inside their miserable shacks on stilts.  Their clothing rots on their backs. There seems to be no prospect of sustainable life and no possibility of a next generation being born.  These are the last days of the end of the world, with only aquatic life able to survive and breed.

Horrific as this is, it is made worse by the failure of community.  The novel is peopled only by the narrator who is an amoral  adolescent, by her ageing protector Gammy, and by a few hostile villagers who rely on the narrator for their food supply but fear her so much that she must wear a bell at all times to warn them of her approach. (It is only when she reaches puberty that her gender becomes obvious; for most of the novel she is genderless.) Information about what has happened is mostly withheld, leaving it to the reader’s imagination, but gradually it is revealed that religious belief triggered genocide. The narrator has only been allowed to survive under Gammy’s care during childhood because of some kind of bodily adaptation to the water.  Scaly feet can traverse the mud without slipping; sharp, pointed teeth enable the tearing of food which is gathered from deep beneath the waters. She is equally at home on land or water.

The narrator is strong, anarchic, and contemptuous of the feeble villagers.  Accustomed to death and drowning and a life without hope, this being is mildly curious about Gammy’s nostalgia for the past, but lives comfortably in a present that has no future. Occasionally there are glimpses of humour but this is a very dark novel indeed.

According to the press release that came with the book, The Comforting Weight of Water was inspired by the many dystopian texts Roanna read as a child and young adult. TBH when I read the novel that emerged from that reading, I am not surprised that so many young people are troubled by hopelessness.  It’s skilful writing, but it’s extremely depressing.

The Comforting Weight of Water won the Arts South Australia Wakefield Press Unpublished Manuscript Award at the 222 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature.

Author: Roanna McClelland
Title: The Comforting Weight of Water
Publisher: Wakefield Press, 2023
Cover art and design: Duncan Blachford
ISBN: 9781743059586, pbk., 276 pages
Review copy courtesy of Wakefield Press.