Roanna McClelland

f 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.

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.)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/06/08/the-comforting-weight-of-water-2023-by-roann...… (more)