Wilderness guides often refer to what is called the “rule of three”. A person can live for three minutes without air, three days without water, and three weeks without food. Cat Brosnan, an Irish research scientist, discovers the implacable cruelty of this rule as she lands in a Namibian desert community, where a capricious water source means that an agonising death is always, potentially, three days away.
It is 2039 and she is following in the footsteps of her mother – also a specialist in global water studies – who went to the same region of northern Namibia and became pregnant, after a brief relationship with a Chinese army officer. Cat’s mother returned to north Kerry where she raised Cat on the family farm but eventually went back to Namibia to rejoin Cat’s father. It is both the news of her parents’ disappearance and the possibility of finding the aquifer (a vast resource of groundwater), which her mother had been looking for, that draws Cat to Dekmantel, a town close to the Angolan-Namibian border.
The subtitle of Thirst is “A novel of the hydrosphere” and author Giles Foden is unsparing in his description of the cynicism and brutality of the hydrosphere’s politics, the scramble for that most precious of resources: water. Not only water to drink but water as a resource for extracting other resources – such as uranium – for the production of atomic energy.
Foden, who was partly raised in Africa and is the author of The Last King of Scotland (1998), Ladysmith (1999) and Zanzibar (2002), uses his intimate knowledge of the southern half of the continent to great effect, evoking both the landscapes and the troubled histories of the region. Cat finds herself caught up in a rebellion led by a dissident Catholic curate known as “the Priest”, who is eloquent in his denunciations of the remorseless asset-stripping of African territories by foreign powers that are in collusion with weak or corrupt local governments. The rebellion is put down with forensic violence by South African mercenaries in the employ of foreign mining companies.
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The extractivist heart of darkness, the novel reminds us, lies not in London or New York, but in Toronto, as Canada is host to three-quarters of the world’s mining companies.
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Though Cat throws in her lot with the rebels, the Priest – educated by an Irish Jesuit, Fr O’Rourke – is not slow to mention Irish involvement in empire, and the complicated legacies of missionary proselytism. The Ireland that Cat leaves behind in 2039 is increasingly prey to violent, anti-immigrant protests, proving that a history of anticolonial resistance does not always grant immunity from a politics of racial exclusion. Foden, who spent part of his youth in the west of Ireland and has taught creative writing at the University of Limerick, narrates with an insider’s feel for the texture of local life and culture, ranging from a scathing take on “fanta-faced mums” in Dundrum shopping centre to a side swipe at a Minister for Local Communities, described by Cat’s uncle Tony as a “member of a flat-capped Kerry dynasty of political gombeens”.
Though a substantial section of the novel is set in the near future, there is little sense that much has changed (apart from passing references to the growing power of quantum computing). The United States and China are still the great powers intent on carving up African resources for the benefit of their own economic and strategic interests. As the Priest observes to Cat, “foreigners come here to replace what they have wasted at home”.
Continuing environmental degradation and energy scarcity leads not to a collective harnessing of the Earth’s resources for a more sustainable future but to a savage dogfight where winner takes all in the pursuit of superpower advantage. Cat’s direct experience of the appalling consequences of thirst is a timely reminder of her own animality, her basic kinship with all the other species on the planet that depend on water for survival. But this newfound awareness of her human fragility feels more like a private revelation than a collective one, as the final location of the aquifer leads to an unembarrassed corporate grab for communal resources. Where Cat intuits connections, commercial interests identify profits, which are mercilessly pursued.
As a novel, Thirst is part Bildungsroman, part adventure story, part climate thriller, and the narrative ride can be bumpy at times, as the showing and the telling get in each other’s way. The key relationship between Cat and her mother remains somewhat underdeveloped, but Foden is compelling in his bleak portraits of the different characters who have a hand in the events unfolding in northern Namibia. Thirst is an ambitious and engaging novel that reveals, in tragic detail, how much the resource wars of the future are bound up in today’s global economic system with its infinite hunger for resources that are stubbornly finite.
Michael Cronin is professor of French at Trinity College Dublin
