Review (#8): "Memory of Water," a novel by Emmi Itäranta (2012)

Underground springwater reservoir beneath Mount Gellért in Budapest, the author's photo (2018)

By Péter MARTON
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Seeing my reviews full of praise for writers like Bo Balder, Anita Moskát or Yuriy Shcherbak you may wonder: Can this guy bite? Does he have the guts to write something really critical for a review? Well, the wondering ends today... This will be a takedown.

"Lovely," "lyrical," "beautiful," etc. These are the adjectives I've typically heard from people describing how Finnish author Emmi Itäranta's book is written. They had less to say about its substance. Now, I'm really not hard put to suspend disbelief for the sake of a good story. I like to enjoy literary values independently of plausibility issues. For a recent and good example of when I benefited from this, take Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven, another dystopia. Sadly, however, the level of writing in Station Eleven was far above what can be found in this book, in Memory of Water (or Teemestarin kirja in Finnish). Which is to say that the writing is not bad, but it compensates in no way for the weakness of the effort that went into building up the world for this supposedly far-future story.

Memory of Water is set in a small village in former Finland, in a world that bears the legacy of climate change, hundreds of years from now. A young daughter takes over from her father in the role of the local tea master and tries to live up to the expectations that come with this, finding her loyalty to her role progressively harder to maintain. The military imposes ever stricter controls on water usage and her fellow villagers have to suffer.

Let's review some book covers first.

The cover of the English version stares at you with cold eyes from a scorching hot world...

The Hungarian edition promises you Elvish cyberpunk. Or a bad hair day...

At least the Italian version is here to save the day... Italians can design gorgeous book covers, too.

Here's a list of as many as 18 major weaknesses in this book, beyond the cover - and why the story never has a chance to work. Keep in mind that this is not a particularly long book, and I didn't stop to take notes after every page.

1. We are in a water-scarce world where people are so poorly adapted to water scarcity that the houses seem to have no cisterns. Villagers collect rainwater in buckets, we are told.
2. In spite of the water scarcity, the female protagonist, the tea master's daughter Noria (I quickly started thinking of her as "ITT Noria") comes out from under the shower at one point – I repeat: from under SHOWERING WATER – moody and dripping.
3. Metals are so rare that any scrap metal that is found has to be handed in to the military, but everyone has smartphones.
4. You may ride around on a solar-powered bicycle because... Why use your legs to pedal in a world of scarcities?
5. Noria's village is drowning in thirst but her father and a long line of predecessors in the role of tea master before him never bothered to share information about the underground lake under the nearby mountain. Not because they were selfish or cruel watching people die left and right, but because tea masters bla-bla. Yes, bla-bla. Tea masters failed to master the team spirit because they had to bla-bla.
6. In the mountain cavern holding the underground lake (equipped with a water pipeline connecting the lake to the tea master's house) there is a low-water mark and a high-water mark but no scale in-between to keep accurate measure of the level of the water. Why measure something accurately when you can do guesswork? It's not like the stakes are existential...
7. Nothing feels quite as refreshing as having a swim in the underground lake, a.k.a. the secret drinking water reserve, going in dirty from head to toe.
8. CDs rotting under loads of waste can be played back after hundreds of years have passed, contrary to my contemporary experience with commercially available Compact Discs after a couple of years.
9. The military is evil, and they want to control the water because they are evil, and they kill people by cutting their throats in public executions because they are evil. In case you didn't get that they are evil, the local military commander (the commander of a small garrison near a small village, not exactly an ideal villain) even tells you in a so-called dialogue that he wants power for the fun of it.
10. Soldiers show no sympathy towards locals (let alone an inclination to rebel) even though many are locals themselves. They just shrug and continue to carry out orders.
11. There is not much corruption in this system.
12. Even though there is no compromise or sufficient corruption, no one bothers to start an insurgency.
13. When the military places Noria under house arrest, they leave behind a sniper in the woods in a concealed position to fire warning shots around the garden gate, thus marking the territory she is not supposed to leave. This is how they guard a house and how they communicate the details of a military decree.
14. As to the world at large, it is somehow dominated by a China that is now called New Qian and reaches all the way to quasi-colony Finland because... Russia forgot to continue to exist in the meantime? (This could be an interesting scenario, of course, but no detail is provided in explanation of how.)
15. "Oceans have reached far inland" because... how could elevated ground stand in the way of this? (This is à la Catherynne Valente, see more on this below.)
16. If water is so scarce in Finland, the "land of the thousand lakes," what should we find elsewhere? Our Noria doesn't ask or even wonder, and somehow her Suomi (Finland) is not full of climate refugees from faraway regions of the world.
17. Not even Norway and Sweden have drinking water because, as we learn, "the oil wars" polluted their drinking water reserves. Nasty oil wars. I don't want one.
18. Towards the end, but still before the house arrest, Noria comes up with an idea. She wants to travel to a military exclusion zone, "the lost lands," because she learns that there may be water, contrary to the official information about the place. What she would do there, with all that water, is an interesting question. It is not impossible to come up with an answer, but at one point she just comes to the conclusion that she doesn't have a clue about this and will do it anyway. It must be the voices in her head.

Reading this novel, given the climate change connection, I was reminded of Catherynne Valente's The Future is Blue – about a human community floating around and living on an island of trash. That story is similarly flawed in its basic concept – it drifts far from what the darkest scenarios of sea level rise predict (and what the amount of water available on the planet could possibly support) to forecast a world where the continents are submerged in water... But at least there certainly are massive concentrations of trash floating around at sea. Bringing knowledge of this to life in imaginative fiction may be alright at the end of the day. It highlights the possibility that human civilisation's most lasting legacy could be a big patch of plastic garbage, and so this kind of exaggeration makes sense. Unlike the ones in the story reviewed here...

In fact, based on what we find here, I just can't imagine that the author ever really tried to understand what it may be like to live under water scarcity, even though there are today (as there have always been) areas in the world where people had to do just that.

After all of the above, you may be surprised to hear that Itäranta's book was nominated for various big awards, including the Philip K. Dick and Arthur C. Clarke Awards.

I'll leave you pondering the significance of that.

Previously reviewed here on EUtopias and Other Futures: "Gagarin: First in Space," a Movie by Pavel Parkhomenko