Review: ‘The Comforting Weight of Water’ By Roanna McClelland

An adolescent who does not fit in navigates a world unlike our own; suspicion reigns and survival itself is beset with the difficulties of an unforgiving environment; an elder provides advice and guidance, but the youngster must find their own way. These classic elements of a coming-of-age novel are both honored and subverted in The Comforting Weight of Water, a post-apocalyptic climate story set in a ghastly future Earth dominated by the “Wet.”

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In this imagining of a world where climate change has continued unchecked, Roanna McClelland, winner of the Wakefield Arts South Australia Wakefield Press Unpublished Manuscript Award, has chosen an unusual premise. Rather than focusing on global temperature rise, melting ice caps, and coastal inundation, McClelland offers a vivid portrayal of the FGOALS model at its most extreme, in which greenhouse gas emissions have created a feedback loop that generates perpetual rain that has destroyed all of human civilization.

The Comforting Weight of Water evokes a novella-length poem rather than a novel, with its repeated, slow-paced descriptions of mold, rotting wood, and endless, watery drudgery. It is never stated exactly how long after the present day the events of the story take place, although around two generations have passed since the remaining humans learned their fate. Contact between people has eroded to those in the immediate neighborhood, and the world inhabited by the main characters has shrunk accordingly. 

Indeed, the narrator, an unnamed youngster of about 12 years old and Gammy, an ailing, elderly woman, play the only two speaking roles in the book. A handful of villagers, sometimes threatening but more often pitiable, lurk in the background, obscured by constant rain.

There is little in the book that resembles conventional plot or action. The reader is immersed into a disintegrating world and shown the narrator’s daily habits and conversations but nothing much happens until about two-thirds of the way through the book; even then, the action is more emotional than literal. Gammy makes allusions to the past, which she remembers but which the narrator has never experienced. The two now know only the encroaching River, along with constant foraging for snails, lizards, and edible reeds, and the tattered, sopping cloaks that are their only cover. 

Over the course of several chapters, the routines of their existence drop tantalizing clues to the pair’s extreme isolation – they live near but not among the others of the village – and contrasts emerge. Unlike Gammy or the others, the narrator is the only person content in the Wet, eager to throw off the shabby cloak and plunge into the River, skilled in gathering molluscs, and eager to consume slimy delicacies like fish eyeballs. The adolescent narrator can see in the rain, and paddles through the River with scaly feet. While the others are referred to as he or she, the adolescent’s first-person narration disguises their gender; by the time a bodily function near the end of the book offers clarity, it has long since become unimportant.

The book does not go into scientific detail about the narrator’s adaptations to the watery world, although they appear to be the result of early conditioning by Gammy. Several other questions also go unanswered. How have plants survived for so long on a scant hour of sunlight per day? Does the rest of the world look like this? How is there enough dry tinder to feed the small cooking fires that Gammy insists on kindling in her leaky hut, despite the narrator’s preference for raw food?

This ambiguity pervades the book; it is the necessary consequence of the constrained worldview the author portrays, where the very existence of scientists is only a memory tinged with scorn and bitterness. However, by choosing this approach, and allowing first-person descriptions of the pervasive Wet to overwhelm any plot that might seep through, the author has limited the book’s scope. The overall feeling is that of a short story that has stretched far beyond its original word count.

Despite this, even a single reading delivers profound emotion: principally, despair. The reader is never manipulated, but cannot help but mourn the total collapse of human civilization, both in a material sense but also through the complete elimination of every vestige of human cooperative society. In this world, not only have microchips and spacecraft disappeared within two generations; so have buildings (other than makeshift huts constructed of rotting wood), all food preservation, vehicles of any kind, domestic animals, roads, books, and furniture. Fire is clearly on its way out, and the last textiles and cooking pots are rotting or rusting away. So is compassion: through the eyes of the narrator, contemptuous of the shabby, dependent villagers, only Gammy is worth saving. But this is also a transactional feeling. It is payment due to an elder, offered in return for care provided while young. Even the pleasure the narrator takes in the daily act of living as a “water baby” (gathering reeds and snails, climbing trees, and swimming in the Rivers’s spreading water) is tainted by the sorrowful tatters of humanity that remain.

At 284 pages, The Comforting Weight of Water can be consumed in a single sitting, although it may be necessary to take a break after the first few chapters to shake off the relentless moisture that seeps even into the reader’s brain. However, the mood of the book persists even after the last page. If there were ever a future to strive against, this is it.

The Comforting Weight of Water
Roana McClelland
2023, Wakefield Press, 284pp

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