Book review: A different shade to the world’s end

Gethan Dick's novel is not only charmingly hilarious, it is also a deeply serious and philosophically capacious book, particularly in relation to womanhood

Gethan Dick's 'Water in the Desert, Fire in the Night' is a novel of planetary catastrophe like no other. Picture: Gabrielle Dumon

• Water in the Desert, Fire in the Night 
• Gethan Dick 
• Tramp Press, €16.00 

There are any number of reasons for the boom in post-apocalyptic novels: The covid pandemic, the chilling potential of AI, the upending of the post-war order and the rise of far-right politics, climate catastrophe, and the threat of global, nuclear conflict.

In Gethan Dick’s brilliant and daring debut novel, Water in the Desert, Fire in the Night, the source of civilisational collapse is an unspecified global plague that leaves London ‘a giant morgue’.

However, this is a novel of planetary catastrophe like no other, eschewing the hackneyed clichés of the genre (‘death is drama enough, what more do you need?’ we are asked). 

There is typical desperation, hunger, and violence, but there are also dollops of surprise, humour, and happiness.

The story charts the year-long journey of a band of survivors who decide to cycle from decimated London to Digne-les-Bains in the south of France, which represents ‘an epicenter of practical possibilities for the new world of disorder’.

It is narrated in the first person by Audaz, a self-deprecating 30-year-old on the fringes of the music industry. 

She is joined by a speechifying, working-class, weed-smoking Rastafarian from Dublin named Pressure Drop, and Sarah, the true hero of the novel, a mixed-race older midwife whose nurturing, ingenuity, and expediency ensures the safety of the group.

The novel is charmingly hilarious. Audaz is nagged by a millennial’s anxiety of underachievement (‘I am basically a dickhead,’ she says of herself).

There are amusing, sharp observations on hairiness in a world without razors; there are reflections on the ubiquity of decathlon sportswear and the impracticality of leggings after the apocalypse.

Even in the midst of catastrophe, there is the potential for joy. 

Audaz falls in love at first sight with charismatic and resourceful fisherman Martin, and the two begin a gloriously fulfilling sexual relationship, related in uproariously erotic and earthy language.

It is a deeply serious and philosophically capacious book also, particularly in relation to womanhood. 

Pregnancy, childbirth, care, and motherhood are major themes. 

The novel explores migration, language and identity: Audaz spent her childhood in Cuba and is the daughter of an East German mother and a communist English father; Pressure Drop is an Irishman in London; Sarah’s father was a southern Baptist.

In a post-Brexit riposte, the characters become migrants in their own right, crossing the English Channel on a boat piloted by Martin.

Water in the Desert, Fire in the Night compels the reader to consider if the possibility of apocalypse offers a chance to imagine alternatives that are already available to us — for instance, less technology, less consumerism, self-sufficiency, and a closer relationship with nature.

This is not lofty idealism, but practicality. Similarly, Audaz’s feminism is pragmatic and contextual.

“You have to be realistic,” Audaz remarks. “Some notions are only as useful as the situation that gives rise to them.”

We are not offered utopia. In a disturbing passage, women in a French château are treated as the imprisoned sexual toys of brutal, exploitative men. 

Like cockroaches, the patriarchy may survive the apocalypse.

“Every second, every millisecond, the world is ending,’ remarks Audaz.

What will be left afterward the apocalypse? There will be dead bodies. There will be hunger. There will be no communications, public transport, or power. There will be mountains of Decathlon stock. Tinned goods will be highly prized.

But there will be survivors, finding ways to live, falling in love, having children, and there will still be a world, ending again and again.

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