The Water Cure

The women who stopped coming to us, they had known love too. They were in retreat from that, and from the world. We watched their personal acts of repair, both physical and spiritual. It was beautiful to see, Mother pointed out. A woman becoming whole again. It's true that, after the water cure, their bodies had a new solidity, as if somebody had redrawn their outlines. Their eyes were clear, ready to return.

So, The Water Cure is marketed as dystopic (which remains ambiguous), and feminist (sure, but in a misogynistic way), and a revenge fantasy (if that's what this is, it makes women seem pretty weak), and that's all unfortunate because what debut novelist Sophie Mackintosh created here had the potential to be really really interesting, but maybe it wasn't meant to be any of those easily marketable things. The writing just tips towards the poetic, there is a nice sense of mystery, and there are some interesting psychological insights, but ultimately, this is more M. Night Shyamalan's The Village than Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Another odd selection from the 2018 Man Booker Prize jury.

We have never been permitted to cry because it makes our energies suffocating. Crying lays you low and vulnerable, racks your body. If water is the cure for what ails us, the water that comes from our own faces and hearts is the wrong sort. It has absorbed our pain and is dangerous to set loose. Pathological despair was King's way of describing an emergency that needed cloth, confinement, our heads held under water. What constituted an emergency was me and my sisters crying in unison, unable to stop.

Told from the rotating points-of-view of three sisters being raised in isolation on a remote island (the oldest was a baby when their parents, Mother and King, brought her away from the outside world, so none of the girls have firsthand knowledge of what it's like beyond their boundaries), and as they have been told their entire lives, men are dangerous and toxic (except for King, of course), and the rituals, tests, and exercises that they have been raised with are the best protections known against a world that's trying to kill them. The first line of the book tells us that King has recently died, and as the sisters try to figure out what that will mean for them, their thoughts and memories paint a rather horrifying portrait of what their lives have been like. King seems like any messianic cult leader, and his wife is an avid participant in some pretty sadistic “lessons”, so it's unsurprising that as in Jonestown or Waco, the result is three indoctrinated, paranoid acolytes who can only judge their situation by the information they've been given – and as we're getting the story from the girls, the reader is in the same low-information situation. On the one hand, King instructing his daughters to line the beach with salt to keep the toxic fumes away sounds like a control tactic, but on the other, streams of sick women used to come to their island in the early days in order to take King's “water cure”. The women would cathartically write their stories down, so as the daughters reread them we learn that at some point, men literally became toxic to women; and because men insist on having access to women's bodies, they would rather women weaken and die than be denied that access:

~ If we were to spit at them, they would spit back harder. We expected that – we were prepared for it even. What we didn't expect was their growing outrage that we even dared to have moisture in our mouths. Then outrage that we had mouths at all. They would have liked us all dead, I know that now.

~ It's the men that don't even know themselves wish you harm – those are the most dangerous ones. They will have you cower in the name of love, and feel sentimental about it. They're the ones who hate women the most.

With these women universally experiencing men as monsters, the image of them submitting to a baptism-like ritual overseen by a man who has his wife and daughters call him “King” is fittingly creepy. But with King gone, what happens next? The long middle section is told solely from the middle daughter's POV, and as she is the one who has been singled out for the denial of love and touch (in another confusing and sadistic control tactic that supposedly keeps them all safe), she is particularly vulnerable when strangers wash up on their beach. I enjoyed being in Lia's mind for this section – their cryptic situation had been well set up to this point, Lia's psychological and emotional frailty are suitably revealed, and the plot is compelling – but what starts right doesn't end right. And that's all I'll say about the plot.

I think that when women talk about what scares us about men's potential to hurt us, we need to agree that it's #notallmen. By setting her book in a maybe-dystopia that might be only a backstory fed to these sisters, I think that Mackintosh's ambiguity does a disservice to the good guys out there. It's an excellent setup for exploring these girls' warped worldview and how it affects their psyches, but saying things like, “It's the men who don't even know they wish you harm who hate women the most” does little to advance feminist goals. I really enjoyed the details and word choices in Mackintosh's writing, but the overall effort left me cold.

Man Booker Longlist 2018:

Snap by Belinda Bauer

Milkman by Anna Burns

Sabrina by Nick Drnaso

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan

In Our Mad And Furious City by Guy Gunaratne

Everything Under by Daisy Johnson

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje

The Overstory by Richard Powers

The Long Take by Robin Robertson

Normal People by Sally Rooney

From A Low And Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan

I just barely squeaked in reading the Man Booker Prize shortlist this year - after having to order half the titles from England - and I really don't know if any of them stand out to me as "a real Booker winner to stand the test of time". In order purely of my own reading enjoyment, I'd rank the shortlist:

The Long Take
Washington Black
The Mars Room
Everything Under
The Overstory
Milkman 

* The prize was eventually won by Milkman, my least favourite of the shortlist, so what do I know? *