The Water Cure, by Sophie Mackintosh - not so small review thoughts

SPOILERS! If you haven’t read the novel and want to, probably don’t read this…

It’s difficult to know what to say about this one.  At first I didn’t like reading it at all.  It was a deeply alien environment, these women’s minds, and it felt unpleasant – I didn’t want to keep learning about their lives, where their parents hurt and abused them for love and to keep them safe from an outside world that’s contaminated.  I suspected it wasn’t really, or not to the extent they were told; that their parents were really running a mini cult with their girl children as the unwitting members…It’s never quite made plain, what happened in the ‘outside’, beyond the barbed wire ‘border’. It may have been climate change accelerated, and they may have been in an area where there’s less rights for women anyway [a forwards-backwards time line of a situation set-up].

But then the small chapters and spare sentences grew on me.  I wanted to know what was really going on.  It was almost like a thriller, told very slowly and obtusely, with slow footsteps in sand, and lots and lots of salt and semi-drownings.  The revelation that the mother is dead – sanctioned by the father you thought was dead but isn’t, who sent the men to bring the women back ‘to the mainland’, as their lives isolated had been ‘a failure’ – “our lives are our lives” Grace thinks – the angriest woman in the book.  Lia, so often the least-loved [and how fucked up is the ‘choose who you love by lots for the year’ system?], falls for the charms and meat-presence of the men the quickest, so desperate for love: “love enough to make you sick”.

So many truths in this book: Lia watches Llew move and thinks –

There is a fluidity to his movements, despite his size, that tells me he has never had to justify his existence, has never had to fold himself into a hidden thing, and I wonder what that must be like, to know your body is irreproachable.


Instead, Lia knows: ‘The body is the purest sort of alarm. If something feels wrong, it probably is.’ But then, she cuts herself often, to make sure her pain equals that of her sisters, so that they will still love her and see her as one of them.  The things we all do, this thing, or other things.

It’s a book not just about the difference between men and women – they are meat, solid, strong, dangerous; the women had been carefully and deliberately brought up to be vitamin deficient and weaker than need be, to keep them in the ‘utopia’ their parents had been trying to build.  It’s also about the cruelty women do to other women because love can be unsafe, between men and woman, between women.  All those semi drownings, part baptism, part controlled revenge.  The way their emotions were denied or funnelled into physical acts designed to show them how fragile their bodies were.  The more I think about it, the more I feel the parents were monstrous.  King toward Grace – ‘love of family, magnified’. Mmm. 

Lots of other reviewers describe the book as luminous and haunting, and it is that, the language is controlled and beautiful and deadly – it hits you and you feel the attenuated lives they lead, the suffocation of it, the need to break free, but the fear always there.  Which is why the sad scenes near the end, where the male characters are killed feel so inevitable and hurtful:  Gwil, by cruelty and loneliness [lack of a mother?  But the only mother in this book is not a good one, she is fighting an internal war through her children’s bodies and lives]. James, who tells the truth to Grace and expects womanly comfort – he gets revenge for being a man in on keeping them in the dark, he is removed as the beginning of their escape and path to adulthood; and then Llew, who has proved deceitful and opportunistic, is executed by Lia….it’s why those scenes are even sadder.   

Given their upbringing, the women would react this way to the men. A very true to life blending of self-defence and pre-emptive action against a whole group of known aggressors.  What they did made perfect sense, in the story.  Then men had hurt them - just as they had been brought up to expect.  It was why Gwil was treated badly as a little man, too small yet to be of harm, but unloved by the women because he would become One of Them. Sad and needless, his death.

I keep wanting to call them ‘girls’ as I write, because so much about them was kept in a state of false childhood dependency by their parents – all those exercises to make them strong were also a regime to divide and conquer them, keep them down.  Sky wasn’t even allowed to be taught to read; King and Mother saw how quick to respond Lia was getting and there went her younger sister’s future reading chances.

It was needless, is what’s so sad.  The violence.  And the mini cult - where other ‘damaged women’ used to come till one of them drowned; another killed herself...medicine and trauma close in effect.  And then the ending, where the sisters brave the outside world – a bit reminiscent of The Truman Show – another story of someone lied to for life who goes off to see what the real world was like…Or a reverse Picnic at Hanging Rock; the girls had been living a reality totally real to them, but not the same world a lot of others were in. So they go off, after one last baptism to take away fear and that has rebound them together, without the awful parents, off hopefully, ‘without fear’ to the rest of the world. 

And also without money, passports or a real clue what the world they are going to is like…I worry. Almost like they were the fabled children raised in the forest by wolves: it makes you fierce, but can you speak the language of everyone?  Can anyone communicate with you? Will you be able to make a place for yourself outside?  But I speak as an outsider myself, so I’m probably projecting.

There’s so much more that could be said about this book and all the comparisons and links in life now, to come, in the past – I’m sure more will come to me when I think more (which I will be doing) – but I came straight here to try and understand what I initially thought.

Got a horrible feeling this wonderful dystopia will stay with me.  There’s a reason I don’t read dystopian novels – and it’s not just that they are grey in colour, futuristic, usually mechanised and just depressing…this is the first I’ve read with beaches and sunlight and birdsong.  It’s because most of them are horribly plausible, and there’s enough to worry about right here right now, already.  It’s as if this book already happened somewhere.  Or is happening.