Emmi Itäranta, Memory of Water (2011, 2014)

Amongst the many impressive things about Emmi Itäranta's debut novel Memory of Water is the fact that its author wrote the book in her native Finnish and also in English. It was published (as Teemestarin kirja) in Finland in 2011; and now, like Beckett, she has become her own autotranslator, with an English version, Memory of Water. What's doubly remarkable is that the English is as good as it is, considerably better than many a native-speaker I could mention. Like Hannu Rajaniemi, Itäranta is capable of writing not just serviceable but actively beautiful English prose. I admire, too, the way this novel is content to tell a plain story, eschewing the bang!-bang!-bang! attention grabbing hyperactivity of too much contemporary genre fiction, proceeding by inflection and rather than clunking direct statement.

It is set in a post climate-meltdown world where the freshwater rivers, lakes and springs have all dried. Water is now a precious resource, and a zealous, oppressive military guard it, permitting each family only the one official water-pipe that is plumbed into their house, and from which a trickle of ill-tasting fluid drips. The narrator, Noria Kaitio, is the 17-year-old daughter of a 'tea master'; for although being set somewhere in the after-disaster Scandianavian/Baltic/West Russian area, there's a strong Japanese cultural inflection here: raking the gravel garden, respecting the elaborate rituals of tea preparation. Mr Kaitio has access to a secret and pure spring; if the military find out it'll be curtains for the whole family. Meanwhile, Noria and a friend uncover an old recording that seems to contain information contradicting the official history.

So, to stay with the good for a moment longer: the relationship between Noria and her father, written with immense sensitivity and delicacy, is genuinely touching, especially when she graduates against the odds to tea master herself and he [spoiler] dies. And the novel's world is vividly evoked, its parched people so bothered by horrid insects they can't go outside without donning an 'insect hood', rummaging through the heaps of rotting and discoloured plastic our culture bequeathed them. But vividly, oddly enough, doesn't necessarily equate to plausibly or suspensive-of-disbelief. And to be frank I didn't really believe it. Early on, Noria's friend Sanja buys some water from a travelling salesman, and reacts furiously that she's been conned: 'bloody sham sold me salt water! I tasted the water first, like I always do, and it was fresh' [16]. Noria explains the ruse ('a double-pipe fraud ... inside the dias there's a secret container with salt water in it. The pipe has two settings ...') But by this stage I'm thinking: the world clearly has no shortage of brine, for the ice caps have melted (Noria's mournfully reflects that she will never see the glorious ice packs of history). And desalination is not hard to manage; a couple of glass bowls and a transparent plastic sheet in the sunlight will do the trick. Accordingly I did not believe that the military would be able to control water distribution so totally, or that water for personal use would be so scarce.

But I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: 'why must you read in so deadeningly literal-minded a manner?' I concede it; it is my curse, for I have a narrowly literal mind and never read poetry. And I'm certainly prepared to accept that Memory of Water figures more metaphorically and pseudo-poetically than it does by any of the restrictive codes of Hard SF plausibility. Water in this novel 'remembers' the abuse humanity inflicted upon the world, both in the sense that it carries the pollutants in its body, and in a more spiritual sense. And Itäranta is good on the intermittencies and strangeness of memory: 'memory has a shape of its own, and it's not always the shape of life' [92] is how Noria puts it. Although in places awkwardly done, there is something commendable in the way Itäranta structures her novel to try to reflect that queer shape. But, at the grave risk of alienating your sympathy altogether, dear reader: too often her poetic-prosy meditations on the nature of water seemed to my ear like unto the sounding brass and tinkling cymbal of pure Fotherington-Thomasness. Too many of these passages read like slogans from inspirations posters, ready to printed over pastel photographs of morning-misty landscapes, or purple-and-cyan mountain peaks arrayed beneath a full moon starry sky.

Water is the most versatile of all elements ... Water walks with the moon and embraces the earth, and it isn't afraid to die in fire or live in air. When you step into it, it will be as close as your own skin, but if you hit it too hard, it will shatter you. [5]

It's all the way through the book:

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. [221]

You may indeed, if your soul be less crusted and derelict than mine, find this uplifting and beautiful. Your moisture, that is, mileage, may vary. Water is delicate, and evaporates and evanishes; but it is also strong as a mighty tide or tsunami, when each individual water droplet says to its fellow, 'let me add my strength to yours'.

PS: And wholly unrelated to this novel, my favourite motivational posters remain these Malcolm Tucker ones.