The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi is the writer’s second science fiction novel for adults, after a slew of young adult novels, and his first since the Hugo and Nebula Award winning debut The Windup Girl in 2009. It is a book I’ve been looking forward to for some time and one which does not disappoint, though it does defy expectations. The book shares the same muscular and visceral prose style, and concerns with climate change and exploitation of both physical and human recourses, as Bacigalupi’s earlier work. However, rather than core science fiction, The Water Knife is a near-future thriller with mainstream crossover appeal.
At an undetermined point in the near future, due to the ravages of climate change, the Southwestern United States has become afflicted with rising heat and extreme water shortages. Water companies in Nevada, California and Arizona wage an armed conflict over the depleted Colorado River, which serves as a lifeline for the region. In the major cities, the privileged elite live in arcologies with self-generating water recycling systems, while the rest of the population ekes out a squalid existence, struggling to survive oppressive heat and dwindling water supplies. The city of Phoenix is in particularly dire circumstances. Squeezed in the power struggle between the more dominant cities in California and Nevada, and flooded by refugees fleeing south from Texas, the city is like a pile of tinder ready to burn.
The titular water knife is a type of secret agent, hired by the various powerful water companies to ‘cut’ wherever they need to secure water supplies. A water knife named Angel Valasquez, is the first major character readers meet, in chapters that alternate between three third person perspectives. Angel works for a powerful Las Vega water baroness named Catherine Case. A hard man with a history of gang crime, Angel has been Case’s number one henchman for many years, since she yanked him from prison. Early into the novel, Case sends Angel to Phoenix to investigate the murder of one of her operatives in the city, a man named Vosovich. The last anybody heard from Vosovich, he claimed to have discovered “a game changer” in relation to local water rights. Now, his handler, a man named Julio Thompson, is spooked and wants out of Phoenix, and Case sends Angel to find out what’s going on.
The next major character we meet is a local of Phoenix, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist named Lucy Monroe, who makes a dangerous living reporting on the water wars. Lucy, with a sister in Vancouver, and has already fled Phoenix once, only to return, pulled by a desire to document the disintegration of her home city, drawn like a moth to the flame. Soon after her return, Lucy drives out during a dust storm to cover a story about man who was just found tortured and murdered in front of the Hilton. She is shocked to discover the man is Jamie, a friend of hers, who works as a water lawyer. Jamie too has recently returned to Phoenix, telling Lucy that he had a major plan to become rich.
The third major character is Maria Villarosa, a young Texas refugee and orphan, who is trying to get enough money together to keep fleeing north. At the beginning of the novel, Maria manages to secure a large supply of cheap water which she sells at her friend Toomie’s pupusa stand to thirsty arcology construction workers. However, when a gang of drug dealers shows up to claim almost all Maria’s profits as tax, she is forced into escort work in order to pay her debts. Her friend Sarah hooks Maria up with a regular client, a Californian water agent named Mike. However, when Maria witnesses Mike and Sara’s murder, she soon becomes embroiled in the same mystery as Angel and Lucy.
InThe Water Knife, Bacigalupi puts his near future dystopia to two complimentary purposes. Firstly, it provides with the ornaments to tell very lean and taut thriller. Bacigalupi’s prose has the power and efficiency of a V8 engine. He evokes a fully realised future society without sacrificing narrative pace or tension. Except for the near future adornments of the setting,The Water Knife would have as much, if not more, in common with books sitting on the thriller or mystery genre shelves at the bookstore as it would with books sitting of the science fiction genre shelves. Secondly, it allows Bacigalupi to offer a warning about the probable consequences about the effects of climate change if governments continue to fail to address the issue. At an early point in the novel Jamie comments to Lucy that the subject of climate change isn’t a matter of belief, but an objective matter of fact proven by scientific data, and that it was a tragic point in history when society collectively decided that this scientific data was subjective and something that could be disbelieved. Likewise, Bacigalupi’s fiction is often about power relationships and the victims of exploitation, and with The Water Knife he skillfully portrays a variety of disproportionate power relationships, particularly between the rich and the poor.
Those science fiction readers coming to the book for the rush of cutting-edge technological extrapolations and heady explorations of hard scientific concepts may be disappointed by the fact that The Water Knife operates at the level of a highly functional thriller. In fact, at times the narrative follows the conventions of the thriller genre a little too slavishly. The plot twists involving betrayals and reversals are telegraphed. What may surprise readers is that the ending of the novel is very abrupt and never reaches the crescendo that would be expected from the epic narrative of near civil war that precedes it. It’s much more a case of a whimper, rather than a bang in terms of pyrotechnics, though undoubtedly the resolution of the narrative has the feel of a tragedy, and, for me, the end of the book had a powerful and lingering emotional resonance. Despite its cozy affections for the traditional motifs of the thriller genre, The Water Knife is rarely comfortable reading, often brutal and confronting. The book flirts with some problematic elements, such as the sexual objectification of women, though in my opinion it does so in a way that feels organic to the story, creates appropriate empathy for the victims, and is balanced by an array of important and powerful female characters.
What Bacigalupi achieves in The Water Knife is a violent and intelligent book fuelled by an angry and polemical argument, that makes compulsive, if slightly predictable, reading. There is a savage beauty to the novel, which makes it one of the best books of 2015 I have read so far. I would not recommend the book to anybody suffering through a long stretch of summer heat, unless they had a cool drink clinking with ice at his or her side. I would recommend The Water Knife to those who would enjoy a near future science fiction thriller, expertly crafted, and imbued with a fiery social conscience. It certainly has me thirsty for more of this Bacigalpui’s work in my near future.
The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi
Orbit, May 2015
364 pages
ISBN: 9780385352871
Review copy received from publisher
Review by Luke Brown, April 2015
