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Irish Times
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Water in the Desert Fire in the Night by Gethan Dick: An ambitious, inventive and stirring debut novel about everything
Water in the Desert Fire in the Night Author : Gethan Dick ISBN-13 : 9781915290168 Publisher : Tramp Press Guideline Price : £14 How do you write the end of the world? It's a question many authors and artists have asked themselves, from HG Wells and Cormac McCarthy to REM. Of course, no one is really interested in rendering the end of the world in art. At the end of the world, there is no art. Looking into the abyss, we see only things that make sense to the living, and those who write of oblivion are usually trying to make sense of life itself – they write about an impending end; or the end of someone else's world; or the end of an old world to make way for a new. In Gethan Dick's ambitious, inventive, and stirring debut novel, the characters have lived, oxymoronically, beyond the end of the world. We find them – an Irish Rastafarian named Pressure Drop; a retired midwife named Sarah; a neoliberal couple named Joy and Trevor; a young student named Adi; and our narrator, a multilingual music roadie named Audaz – in a series of railway arches in postapocalyptic London. They are the 'living, breathing afterparty' of the world as it once was, surviving off the 'all too much' left over from a previously hyper-consumerist society. (The arches, now abandoned, were a Chinese supermarket, a bike repair shop, a false-tooth business, artists' studios, a church, House Clearance). READ MORE All networks of communication have gone dark, and the land is awash with corpses. As they try to navigate what to do next – to look, however narrowly, into the future – it becomes clear that Sarah has a plan. She wants to 'save the world in a feminist way' by journeying to Dignes-les-Bains in France, a kind of Utopia where she will set up a midwifery school, with Audaz as her apprentice. And so the novel becomes an odyssey, our characters (minus Joy and Trevor), gathering supplies and heading, by bike, into the great unknown. This is dystopian fiction, but also utopian The odyssey is an accommodating form (just ask Joyce). You can wander off on as many tangents as you please. Dick uses it to great effect, meandering through everything from Cuban communism (Audaz grew up in Cuba, before moving to London), to semantics (Pressure Drop has a particular fascination with the meaning of words), to an anecdote about a secret truffle farmer and the beliefs of the ancient Greeks, to the joys of the kind of hangover where you don't get out of bed until after dark ('once you're out in this new beginning of a new darkness, your flayed nerve-endings are all quivering and the world feels raw and new and hilarious and strange and beautiful', Audaz observes, in the book's typically charged and opulent, yet colloquial, prose style). The book has no chapters, and relatively few line breaks, and at times this run-on nature can leave the reader bleary-eyed and slightly lost. But it makes sense that a book about a new world order should veer off course from the typical order of a novel, and attempt something new. With the treacherous journey these characters take, across sea and land, seeking asylum in places that turn out to trade in sex and violence, it's hard not to think of the plight of present-day migrants, many of whom are fleeing their own end-of-world scenarios (war, climate disaster, extreme poverty, persecution). But the events of this book are abstracted from political context. The point seems to be to place the reader into a close and blinkered viewpoint. We only understand what the characters understand about the world, which is very little. 'Fragmentation,' Audaz points out, 'is our natural state.' 'It is very recent in human history that we have any idea of overview – until stuff like newspapers and reading became really common, overview was just what the oldest person in your village remembered and what the farthest-travelled person discovered,' she muses, to the wonder – almost envy – of anyone who has grown up in an era of mass-communication. This close, childlike view – this innocence about the universe – also points to another of the book's main themes: that the end of the world is also the beginning of a new one. Devoid of an overarching understanding, the characters must construct their own; they must learn from one another, and from their experiences. The main exploration of this topic is through the beginning of all our worlds: birth. The book offers a deep and philosophical – but also carnal and physical – exploration of this sublime power mothers have, to deliver more life and to carry the past forwards into the future. Water in the Desert Fire in the Night is a curious and expansive text. I have called it an odyssey. It is also a love story. It is dystopian fiction, but also utopian. It is a philosophical study, full of pertinent, unanswerable questions. What does the world look like after the veil of civilisation has lifted? What continues to matter, and what does not? Are there some things that are so real, they continue after the end? Like love? Like life?
RTÉ News
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Extracted: Water in the Desert Fire in the Night by Gethan Dick
We present an extract from Water in the Desert, Fire in the Night, the debut novel from Gethan Dick. Someone wakes you and it's the end of the world. Someone lets you sleep and it' the end of the world. Somebody comes in you and it's the end of the world. Somebody comes out of you and it's the end of the world. Every second, every millisecond, the world is ending. Water in the Desert, Fire in the Night is a novel about mothering, wolves, bicycles, midwifery, post-apocalyptic feminism, gold, hunger and hearth. What's worth knowing, learning and passing on, what's worth living for and what sometimes cannot be explained. The fact is that the world ends all the time, the thing is what to do next. It's a tale fizzing with energy, anger, fear, and, ultimately, hope. And like I said, I'm not telling you this to say I saw it coming. After something happens everybody wants to say they told everyone it was going to, they saw it from way off, they know the moment they knew exactly when it was going to happen, they probably even know when they picked their pointy finger off that final pint and poked it at your face and told you it was going to happen. They're liars. No f**ker saw this coming. I didn't see it coming even after it had happened. But it was coming, nonetheless. And it's no help to try to sort cause from effect, to get caught in the loops of if this, if that, would things have been different or would it all have turned out the same but a year, a decade, a generation later? In the end, you are where you are. Because maybe it's like love: that there's a moment, a moment as small as when you're there trying to climb over some railings, and you're both laughing so hard you can't keep your eyes open, and something snags on one of the spikes and you're trying to say, 'Wait ... ' But the laughter's like a hammer in your belly and the words are underneath it and then there's a rip and a thud and the laughter's getting higher and higher pitched as your lungs empty out and it'll be bruises and mending but you're over. And then empty, ringing air as you both gasp for breath at the same time, then the laughter starts again. And it's not until years afterwards that you know that that was it: the moment after which no other future was possible. Though obviously you don't know what that future's going to be. It's only by thinking very, very small that we carry on imagining we know what the future holds, and even then, life will get in the way. And like I said, almost all the things people reckon they say about the future, you only hear them after that future's already become the past. So, to be straight: I didn't see it coming, I don't know why it happened, and I don't know what's going to happen. That makes me different to most of the people I've talked to about it, which, to be fair, is not that many. There was me and Sarah and Pressure Drop and Adi and, for a bit, Joy and Trevor, in the Arches – a set of converted railway arches on a cul-de-sac and an amazing place to hide. When we'd arrived in the dark the night before, I'd had no idea how amazing, beyond the heavy doors and a lot of very solid wall all around. The first night there we all huddled in Arch one, the United Kingdom of Divine Love Church. They had a carpet, along with cushions and blankets. We made nests and hid in them. Nobody wanted to stay up making guesses about the noises outside. I must have slept. 'Must have slept,' as if there's some kind of shame in it, so, fine, I didn't 'must have slept,' I just slept. I was tired, it was night, I've always had a knack for it. No bed too uncomfortable, no bus too rattly, no house party too noisy. It's all changed now obviously, but back then I could've slept through the end of the world, and some would say that in fact, night after night, I did. People who can't sleep think people who can are thoughtless or simple or haven't understood the enormity of the situation. Actually, it's just like any other survival instinct – some people are better at it than others. Some are better at running, some at fighting, some can go for ages without food, some immediately cop off with the nearest alpha male, some sleep. And that first morning in the Arches it was pretty clear that only me and Pressure Drop had, and he'd been weed assisted. It was quiet outside when I opened my eyes. I didn't move. The others were talking. There were shadows moving on the wall behind where the pulpit was – though there wasn't actually enough light to cast a shadow and 'pulpit' is too grand a word, 'lectern' maybe, or just one of those angled things that you sometimes saw at a restaurant with a menu taped to it. The others were trying to decide whether to look outside. They'd been trying to decide for a while. Adi was saying 'No, no, no, no, no – for a start, I opened this place up, and maybe it doesn't matter but that makes me responsible – not for you guys, but for what's in here, and I don't want that on my head right now.' He was always like that, proper, full of thoughts about how things ought to be done and how the things that had been done would be explained when the people in charge got back in charge. Now it just looks sweet and naïve, but back then Adi's uptightness seemed sensible and reassuring despite how young he was. 'Anyway, you don't even have any kind of logical or rational reason for opening up, do you? What's your reason for opening?' 'It's psychological.' That was Joy. 'That's not a reason.' 'Yes, it is. And you can't argue with psychology, if somebody needs something psychologically you can't argue with that.' As well as being an idiot, Joy was super pretty and Trevor's girlfriend – all things that made it difficult to argue with her, but Adi wasn't giving up. 'Well if you can't argue with it, it's not just not a reason, it's not rational or logical either!' 'I think we will have to take the decision all together.' That was Sarah – also difficult to argue with, because she was older and, it became apparent, only insisted on something when she totally knew she was right. I learned much later that she'd been taught to pick her battles by her father – a Black United States serviceman who came to build airbases in the midlands and never went home to segregation after he discovered he could win a dancing competition with a white girl as his partner. Without knowing its pedigree I could hear the quiet, gentle ruthlessness in her voice. There was a collective rustle as she, Adi, Joy and Trevor all turned to look over at where me and Pressure Drop were still curled in our bundles.
The Guardian
14-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Water in the Desert Fire in the Night by Gethan Dick review – hope at the end of the world
Gethan Dick's dystopia begins at Elephant and Castle in London. The narrator, a young woman who considers herself unexceptional, recalls a break in a water main at the big roundabout, a rupture that revealed 'white quartz pebbles being washed clean, rattling as they went like in any stream bed'. The surfaces we have built on the face of the Earth to sustain us are just that, only surfaces, easily cracked open to show what's roiling beneath. And this is how it is at the end of the world in Water in the Desert Fire in the Night. The setup for this slender, evocative debut will be eerily familiar to all its readers, albeit with the disaster quotient kicked up a notch. A pandemic arises and begins its cull, only this one is unstoppable: it results in whole streets full of the dead. Those who survive – and we don't know why they do – must stick together, and so this is a tale of unlikely alliances between a group of travellers determined to reach a refuge in the south of France, a place called Digne-les-Bains. One of this scrappy band, an older woman called Sarah, had spent time there in the 1970s – according to her it is an 'epicentre of practical possibilities for the new world of disorder', with hot springs, rich forests, wild mushrooms, plentiful deer. Like Cormac McCarthy's The Road or Octavia E Butler's Parable of the Sower, this is the novel of a journey both away from and toward. Its originality lies in the appeal of the narrative voice, one of millennial diffidence that is still somehow salted with optimism. 'So, to be straight: I didn't see it coming, I don't know why it happened, and I don't know what's going to happen.' Dick creates a world where everything has not quite fallen apart, not yet, though we know that real collapse can't be far away. One might argue that there are three vantage points from which to consider societal destruction, whatever its source. There's the moment of violent change – HG Wells's The War of the Worlds fits this pattern. There is radical alteration long established, as in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. And there is the space just past seismic change, when a novel's characters acknowledge what is gone, still recall how things used to be, must find their feet in a new and frightening reality – Ben Smith's Doggerland comes to mind. Water in the Desert falls into this category, prompting the reader to wonder: how will I fare when things go belly-up? So it's easy to identify with the narrator as she goes along for the ride of survival. Along with Sarah – a retired midwife, which comes in handy – and the narrator are the charismatic Pressure Drop, a Dubliner who has turned to Rastafarianism, and the young and idealistic Adi. They leave London for the Sussex coast and prepare to cross the Channel; there they encounter Martin, whose practicality will aid the expedition and who will capture the narrator's heart. 'I don't believe in love at first sight, but actually whether you believe in something or not has nothing to do with whether or not it exists.' Yet these characters never feel fully rounded; there is something thin about them as they make their way towards imagined safety. The narrative can stray towards the obvious, as when one suffers a minor injury – something that would once have been easily treatable but now proves fatal. It's hard to be moved by this death, which feels instrumental; designed to prove a point, rather than emotionally true. One of the most compelling characters in the book sits firmly in flashback: the narrator's late mother Heike, born in East Germany, married to an Englishman, who made a life for the family in Cuba before settling in London. She is just the kind of person you'd want around at the end of the world, but a memory must suffice. 'Even as a mortified teenager I knew that it wasn't just right the way we lived, it was cool. And it made an amazing backdrop, because it was beautiful through and through: her rows of jars of many-coloured pickles and preserves; her allotment overflowing with everything worth growing; the cover of a thousand mends that she crocheted for the sofa that was in the house when we arrived, and was still in it twenty-odd years later when I left.' The destination isn't the point of this novel; it is the journey. Somehow, hope endures. 'There's only forward, and you can only go forward from where you are, however wrecked that place is.' Words to live by, these days. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Water in the Desert Fire in the Night by Gethan Dick is published by Tramp (£13.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
