Book Review
Dust to dust The Water Knife is a great summer book — and an invitation to worry about the future By Scott Dickensheets It’s not some lame, one-apocalypse-fits-all
to the still-verdant north, the dire gravity
dystopia that sci-fi novelist Paolo Baciga-
of those rights eventually pull the main
lupi has contrived for his new yarn, The
characters into orbit. Along the way, there
Water Knife (Knopf, $25.95). Requiring a
are enough breakneck chases, betrayals,
drought-shriveled near future for his three
shootings, stabbings, bombings, beatings,
protagonists — Angel, a Vegas water thug;
sex scenes, torture scenes and, yes, hyena
Lucy, a Phoenix journalist; Maria, a Texas
maulings to keep the beach reader locked in.
refugee — to flee across and be wounded
But Bacigalupi is interested in more than
in, Bacigalupi has extrapolated, broadly and
action. He wants us to think about what will
deeply, what would happen if the American
crack when catastrophe amplifies the South-
Southwest dried up. They feel right, too, the
west’s already Darwinian competition for
interlocking ecological, human, social and
scarce water. What cracks, of course, is our
moral catastrophes he
pretense of civilization.
came up with, from dust
There’s no polity left, no
storms and crooked pol-
sense that everyone’s in
itics to tides of doomed
this together — there’s
refugees and baroque
only a feral and morally
criminality. So right, in
disfiguring strain of cap-
fact, that his scenario
italism that infects every
works not only as the
level of society, from the
setting for the book’s
disaster opportunists
hurtling, beach-ready
who roll into gasping
plot, but as scarily plau-
Phoenix to leverage
sible clairvoyance about
a payday from all the
what might happen in
misery, to the water
real life along a dying riv-
agents who’ll kill you
er widely acknowledged
over a sheet of paper, to
to be the nation’s most
over-the-top criminals
imperiled.
whose gaudy cruelty is
The Water Knife
just good branding in a
opens with the all-powerful head of the
freewheeling marketplace of commodified
Las Vegas Water Authority — a Pat Mulroy
desperation. Everyone knows the score and
stand-in named Catherine Case — using a
everyone looks the other way.
corrupt court order as a pretext to unleash
In such a setting, all alliances are tempo-
her private military force (you read that
rary and your layers of cultivated illusion are
right) to drop some flaming law of the river
pitilessly peeled away. You think you have
on a water plant in rival Arizona. Note: If
principles. But you also have a family:
that summary suggests any satiric intent, know that nothing in The Water Knife is played with a wink. With that slam-bang opener setting the
He reached into his jacket and laid a handful of photos on the table. “But this is your sister, is it not?” Lucy gasped. Anna, up in Vancouver.
stakes, the plot is simple enough: Everyone’s
Photos of her picking up Ant from day care,
pursuing a set of previously unknown, very
buckling her son into their little blue Tesla …
old, incalculably valuable Native American
Lucy stared at the photos, feeling sick.
water rights that could
Hear more Hear an author Q&A at desertcom panion.com/ hearmore
tip the region’s balance of power. Amid the masses
And just like that, someone who trusts her will be sold out. Amid his troubling vision of a depleted
relentlessly struggling for
Southwest, it’s Bacigalupi’s view of human
water or trying to escape
nature that’s genuinely parched and bleak.
J u ly 2 0 1 5
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