Memory of Water

Memory of Water by Emmi Itäranta is a highly recommended, sensitive dystopian novel set in a future where water is scarce and controlled by the military.

Noria Kaitio, 17, is studying with her father to continue the family tradition of tea master. Set in future Finland, now part of the New Qian empire of Asia and Europe, global warming has made many areas of the world uninhabitable. Water shortages are common and what water there is is strictly controlled by the military and rationed out. When Noria learns the secrets of being a tea master, a role traditionally only held by males, and all the teahouse ceremony involves, she also learns a bigger secret: the location of a hidden spring unknown to anyone but her father.

Major Bolin has show more been protecting her father but when Commander Taro comes on the scene it becomes clear that he is suspicious and plans to discover their secret and destroy her family.

Noria also explores the plastic filled landfills of garbage with her friend Sanja, who is able to repair many broken things. They find a disk that mentions yet another secret, a secret Noria also wants to learn.
This dystopian novel by Finnish author Itäranta is set in one small area of a very change future world. Although some of the large global scale catastrophes are hinted at or mentioned, the setting remains in this one small part of Finland and the story stays focused on the effects the new world has on one person in that small part of the new world.

The writing in Memory of Water can be described as poetic, delicate, atmospheric, and expressive. The juxtaposition of a hard, harsh world being described in beautiful prose can be startling, but the contrast helps set the tone of despair even as the carefully crafted writing flows along so seductively. While there is tension in this novel, it is not overwhelming. It flows along at an even pace, picking up speed slowly.

Although not stated, I'd place this among other YA dystopian fiction selections based on the age of the character and the uncomplicated linear plot. The writing is a step up from most YA selections, however.

Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of HarperCollins for review purposes.

Excerpt
harpervoyagerbooks.com/2014/05/27/excerpt-of-the-memory-of-water-by-emmi-itaranta/ show less

There is nothing about Memory of Water that is far-fetched or difficult to fathom. China could in fact become a globally dominant country. The world could separate into distinct unions separated by geography and occupied by the major power sources. Yet, the true heart of the story is a slap in the face regarding the dire consequences of global warming. Not only does Itäranta show the lasting impact on weather patterns, economies, and inhabitable geography, it also details the damage our current garbage is doing to our environment. The descriptions of the piles and piles of plastic – those items that will never decompose and are still easily identifiable after all those years – are downright frightening.

Noria is an intriguing show more character. Unlike other dystopian heroines, she lives a life of privilege. She has ready access to water. Her position as the daughter of a Tea Master gives her more influence and also grants her access to more and better food. She is, in many ways, very spoiled. True, she shares her water when the secret is out, but she does not do so willingly. There is a sense of reluctance in the beginning and a feeling of coercion that she has to do so in order to avoid getting in trouble with the police state. For all her altruistic impulses, she remains more concerned about her family’s secrets and traditions than she does about fighting against the system.

Given the slow-moving nature of the story and the massive amounts of world-building to clearly establish this future version of Scandinavia, one cannot help but think that this focus on the damage done to the ecosystem and the resultant scramble for water/power is the point of the novel. The major dystopian elements of Noria’s world are avoidable, and Itäranta is trying to show readers just that. Yes, Noria’s story is interesting for its foreignness and her willingness to stand firm to her beliefs, but it is what is happening outside her sphere of influence that is truly intriguing. The scientific exploration Noria discovers on the CDs, the unique uses for the junk plastic, the structure of society, the huge Chinese influence half a world away – the sheer magnitude of the changes that are a direct result of global warming and the melting of the polar ice caps are more fascinating and chilling because of their implication of past society’s inability to properly conserve and protect the environment. Memory of Water is impressive in the warning it presents rather than the story it tells of a world gone dry. show less

Noria is the daughter of a tea master and his apprentice, living in an unnamed village in what is now Finland, and what Noria calls the Scandinavian Union – under New Qian occupation – at an unspecified point in the distant future. Very soon it becomes clear that the world we know today has changed beyond recognition by global warming and the relentless plunder of Earth’s resources: the region where Noria and her family live is surrounded by desert; water is so scarce that it is rationed, and such a precious commodity that it is even used as currency, while the military controls the entire supply; there are no more winters, and the images of snow and ice can only be found in books; the world has run out of its oil reserves, so show more Noria’s village represents a curious mixture of a low- and high-tech society; wars were fought over oil and water in the past, while there is an ongoing war somewhere on the continent. Before Noria’s graduation ceremony that will see her become a tea master in her own right, her father takes her into the fells and shows her a secret spring that generations of tea masters – as watchers of water – have had the duty to protect, and makes her promise that she honour the secret too. But events have already been set in motion that will make Noria realise that sometimes it is the duty of a tea master to break with tradition …

One of the joys of discovering a new author is that you don’t always know where – or for that matter when – you’ll end up; this is exactly the case here. Memory of Water is a thought-provoking coming-of-age tale written in the most beautiful, almost lyrical, prose, but there’s no getting away from the fact that the portrayed events are very bleak and that from the opening lines of the prologue the novel is moving towards its inevitable conclusion. One of the things that struck me was that Noria’s society appears to be dominated by women; there are men around, but they are usually of Noria’s father’s age and traders or merchants, and there is a distinct lack of young men, and I could only assume they were away fighting in the war; the men that do appear in the village are often not local and in the military, and as such to be feared. There is a tangential thread to the story about a past-world expedition that took up too much room in the novel and left too many questions unanswered, and one of these highly unlikely coincidences that are difficult to get away with, even when they’re written with the best intentions; yet for all that, there is some memorable imagery to be found within its pages: for example, the so-called plastic grave, where Noria and her friend Sanja like to dig for artefacts from the past-world; secrets acting like water; the painting of a blue circle on the door of someone’s house where the military decides a water crime has been committed; a poignant version of a cremation, where the dead person’s water is used to nourish the earth; and the ancient Greek notion that one has to cross the river to the underworld after death takes on an added significance.

There were also powerful scenes that spoke to me as a mother, especially when they cannot provide water for their thirsty and sick children; coincidentally, my son had a high temperature this week and it felt like a complete luxury to simply open the tap and give him all the cold, clean water he needed straight away after reading about how the rations given out to the villagers are never enough. No second guesses where the author’s sympathies lie in the current environmental debates, and I believe we can all do with acting more responsibly, but for all that her novel does not come across as preachy. I can only guess that the epilogue contains a glimmer of hope, but I personally can’t see it and the novel is simply too bleak to be picked up again.

I will end this review with the most powerful sentiment the novel has to offer in my opinion, spoken by Noria’s friend Sanja: when talking about the people in the past-world, she tells Noria that it is not them but their relics she’s thinking of, because they didn’t think about them, i.e. future generations, either.

(This review was originally written as part of Amazon's Vine programme.) show less

A curious book, in a good way. A post-global-warming-and-Chinese-takeover story that at first seems to present itself as yet another Collins-style teenage dystopia, but then shrugs at launching the Big Heroic Plot and instead chooses to act local, mixing buddhist philosophy and stubborn Scandinavian existentialism into something that seems to want to fuse PK Dick and Tove Jansson (OK, enough with the namedropping already).

It's long after the polar icecaps melted, in what used to be central Finland and is now a border province of New Qian. The old coastlines are long gone, the world has dried up and freshwater is increasingly rare. Our narrator is a young woman apprenticing for her father to become the new Tea Master of her village - a show more position that, like most traditions, has been important for so long nobody remembers when it wasn't or why, but which of course relies on the very resource that's becoming ever more scarce, ever more controlled, ever more the privilege of those with guns. They have access to a secret well, but the rest of the village don't, and her best friend (or more) has none... From there, Itäranta spins a tale that for the most part isn't interested in any big rebellions or revelations, but instead the personal angle, with Water as the central (perhaps at times too central) metaphor of constance and change, along with the wordless power of silence (I did mention it's a Finnish novel, right?) to both oppress and release, destroy and preserve.

It's not the strongest 4 I've ever doled out, it gets a bit preachy at times and I'm not entirely sure it's quite as profound as it tries to be. But it's a quick, engrossing read that still has a serene but serious dignity to it, and one that seems to want to seep into other things. We'll see how it holds up, but for now I really like it. show less

“Water is the most versatile of all elements. It isn’t afraid to burn in fire or fade into the sky, it doesn’t hesitate to shatter against sharp rocks in rainfall or drown into the dark shroud of the earth. It exists beyond all beginnings and ends.”

Set in a post-apocalyptic world where water is at a premium, Memory of Water is the story of seventeen-year-old Noira is an apprentice tea master, learning from her father the intricacies of the tea ceremony that has been passed down through the generations. Her education consists not only of the secrets of the tea ceremony, but also the tangible secret of a spring, hidden from the government and known only to the tea master of her village. Foraging through the plastic graveyard of show more garbage from the times before, Noira and her friend Sanja find a silver disc that speaks of water in the Lost Lands, which the government insists have no potable water and are inaccessible.

As war rages on in distant parts of her country, water rationing becomes stricter and stricter until Noira has to make difficult choices–to move to the city to be with her mother, to attempt an expedition to the Lost Lands or not, and whether or not to continue to commit water crime by hiding the spring and help those in need in her village.

This beautifully-wrought story is part coming-of-age novel, part warning, both about nurturing the planet and man’s inhumanity to man. show less

Shortlisted for the Clarke Award in 2015 - and it’s not often a translated work makes it onto the award shortlist. In fact, the only one prior to Memory of Water was Stanisław Lem’s Fiasco, in 1988, although there have been four since Itäranta (Frankenstein in Baghdad, The Electric State, Vagabonds and The Anomaly).

Memory of Water was originally published in Finnish in 2012. There’s no mention of a translator, and Itäranta lives in the UK according to the bio, so I’m guessing she translated the novel herself. That might explain a couple of word misuses, such as “the hidden core of the profession pertains that tea masters were once…”, and “woolgathering” when context suggests it should be “digressing”. Less show more understandable is the use of Scandinavian Union as the name of the setting of the novel, when it seems to be set in Finland, which is not a Scandinavian country, and both Sweden and Norway are described as polluted and uninhabitable.

Several centuries from now, climate crash, and war, has drastically changed the face of the Earth. Many former nations are now underwater, and the Chinese rule pretty much everywhere. Water is so scarce it is controlled by the military. Noria is the daughter of a tea master, and his apprentice. He shows her the family secret - a hidden spring.

After Noria’s father dies, she becomes tea master, and her mother moves to the capital, Xinjing. In a nearby garbage dump, Noria and her friend find a series of CD-ROMs which contain the log of an expedition to the Lost Lands (ie, Sweden and Norway) several centuries previously. The expedition was presumed lost and the Lost Lands uninhabitable. The novel never actually reveals what’s in the logs, only that it contradicts what everyone has been told. Noria, and her best friend, to whom Noria revealed the secret of the spring, decide to retrace the route of the lost expedition. Before they can set off, the military arrest Noria.

Memory of Water is not the first sf novel to feature a Chinese-controlled future. Two examples which spring to mind are Gwyneth Jones’s Bold as Love quintet and David Wingrove’s Chung Kuo series. Nor is it the first sf novel set in a Europe mostly underwater. Despite that, Memory of Water’s setting never quite convinces. The writing is lovely, and the surroundings are described in poetic and leisurely detail (sometimes somewhat over-leisurely). But the scarcity of water doesn’t - I’m tempted to say “hold water”, but that would be cruel. Anyway, it doesn’t seem entirely credible, and if it were the case then I doubt the tea ceremony would still exist centuries later. The fact Sanja can fix “past-technology”, including a CD-player, is not really feasible either, but it breaks suspension of disbelief less than the water thing.

Which is a shame, as the "water thing” is what the novel is actually about. show less

I just finished this book like ten minutes ago, I'm still very emotional. The ending sucked all the breath right out of me. It was painful and hopeful. Actually, that's it; that's the book: painful and hopeful.

A dystopian future in a world where waste ran rampant, climate change went unchecked, and water is scarce and rationed by the military. A story of tradition and change as viewed through a hereditary skill. A testing of friendship, family, and love.

It's quite lovely.