How do you write the end of the world? It’s a question many authors and artists have asked themselves, from HG Wells and Cormac McCarthy to REM. Of course, no one is really interested in rendering the end of the world in art. At the end of the world, there is no art.
Looking into the abyss, we see only things that make sense to the living, and those who write of oblivion are usually trying to make sense of life itself – they write about an impending end; or the end of someone else’s world; or the end of an old world to make way for a new.
In Gethan Dick’s ambitious, inventive, and stirring debut novel, the characters have lived, oxymoronically, beyond the end of the world. We find them – an Irish Rastafarian named Pressure Drop; a retired midwife named Sarah; a neoliberal couple named Joy and Trevor; a young student named Adi; and our narrator, a multilingual music roadie named Audaz – in a series of railway arches in postapocalyptic London.
They are the “living, breathing afterparty” of the world as it once was, surviving off the “all too much” left over from a previously hyper-consumerist society. (The arches, now abandoned, were a Chinese supermarket, a bike repair shop, a false-tooth business, artists’ studios, a church, House Clearance).
All networks of communication have gone dark, and the land is awash with corpses. As they try to navigate what to do next – to look, however narrowly, into the future – it becomes clear that Sarah has a plan. She wants to “save the world in a feminist way” by journeying to Dignes-les-Bains in France, a kind of Utopia where she will set up a midwifery school, with Audaz as her apprentice. And so the novel becomes an odyssey, our characters (minus Joy and Trevor), gathering supplies and heading, by bike, into the great unknown.
This is dystopian fiction, but also utopian
The odyssey is an accommodating form (just ask Joyce). You can wander off on as many tangents as you please. Dick uses it to great effect, meandering through everything from Cuban communism (Audaz grew up in Cuba, before moving to London), to semantics (Pressure Drop has a particular fascination with the meaning of words), to an anecdote about a secret truffle farmer and the beliefs of the ancient Greeks, to the joys of the kind of hangover where you don’t get out of bed until after dark (“once you’re out in this new beginning of a new darkness, your flayed nerve-endings are all quivering and the world feels raw and new and hilarious and strange and beautiful”, Audaz observes, in the book’s typically charged and opulent, yet colloquial, prose style).
The book has no chapters, and relatively few line breaks, and at times this run-on nature can leave the reader bleary-eyed and slightly lost. But it makes sense that a book about a new world order should veer off course from the typical order of a novel, and attempt something new.
With the treacherous journey these characters take, across sea and land, seeking asylum in places that turn out to trade in sex and violence, it’s hard not to think of the plight of present-day migrants, many of whom are fleeing their own end-of-world scenarios (war, climate disaster, extreme poverty, persecution). But the events of this book are abstracted from political context. The point seems to be to place the reader into a close and blinkered viewpoint. We only understand what the characters understand about the world, which is very little.
“Fragmentation,” Audaz points out, “is our natural state.”
“It is very recent in human history that we have any idea of overview – until stuff like newspapers and reading became really common, overview was just what the oldest person in your village remembered and what the farthest-travelled person discovered,” she muses, to the wonder – almost envy – of anyone who has grown up in an era of mass-communication.
This close, childlike view – this innocence about the universe – also points to another of the book’s main themes: that the end of the world is also the beginning of a new one. Devoid of an overarching understanding, the characters must construct their own; they must learn from one another, and from their experiences. The main exploration of this topic is through the beginning of all our worlds: birth. The book offers a deep and philosophical – but also carnal and physical – exploration of this sublime power mothers have, to deliver more life and to carry the past forwards into the future.
Water in the Desert Fire in the Night is a curious and expansive text. I have called it an odyssey. It is also a love story. It is dystopian fiction, but also utopian. It is a philosophical study, full of pertinent, unanswerable questions. What does the world look like after the veil of civilisation has lifted? What continues to matter, and what does not? Are there some things that are so real, they continue after the end? Like love? Like life?
