I missed this review when it came out in Interzone. Damn.
… there are still some authors who look to the universal; who understand that focusing on the daily experiences of one man and his dog isn’t necessarily sufficient when exploring the 21st century
Please, for the love of Christ, buy it here.
And let’s hope it has better luck than the ship on the cover.
This is modern science fiction in full pomp: it has a multitude of ideas, a wide-ranging narrative, an almost unbelievably ambitious casting of its net, taking one narrative chance after another. It is also a beautifully written novel, full of colour and inventive image.
—Christopher Priest
The paperback launches 25 May. Let’s hope it has better luck than the ship on the cover.
I’d cut my teeth on Arthur Ransome, consumed everything of Joseph Conrad’s down to the letters and the science fiction, and had recently read Outerbridge Reach, Robert Stone’s haunting riff on the fraudulent and peculiar voyage of Donald Crowhurst. But by the time I reached Muscat and the shores of the Arabian Sea my “simple sea adventure” had already fallen through several rabbit holes.
For a start, in the bar I was drinking in, the parrot by the door turned out to be a robot. It squawked at precise, thirty-second intervals. For another, the policeman I’d arranged to meet turned out to have spent his youth shooting up South Korean trawlers with an “A-Kay”. (Portly, friendly, a family man, he wanted me to know he was still on first-name terms with automatic weapons.) Around us, the walls were hung with photographs taken from old travel books. Graham Greene shading into Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen. Little boats. Little harbours. A lot of boats disgorging hemp sacks and balsa crates on to a lot of ramshackle quays. This was the moment I realised that Dead Water was not going to be a straight story.
Two thirds of the earth’s surface has been lost to us, stolen away by vast corporations, complex algorithms, robot cities, and ships as big as towns. Everything ends up in a box these days. According to my policeman friend, even the pirates are trapped. Their motherships, controlled from as far away as London, São Paulo and Toronto, are serviced by patrol boats. They never see land. The sea has become a kind of negative of itself: a trap, rather than an escape, a fusion of disappointment and terror.
The real sea rovers these days are the boxes. Shipping containers lead lives far more exotic, complex and glamorous than their human handlers do. Their stories are cryptic, of course: hidden in paper, buried among figures, turned to logic gates and light. What if we could unpick them?
Dead Water is a story of two worlds: the famished, desert world we are making for ourselves, and the cold, fluid world inhabited by the containers. Its circle of logic and chance embraces over a hundred years, most continents and one magnetic pole. At the centre of the circle sits the Indian Ocean, the most heavily travelled body of water on Earth. Holding this delicate structure together requires a master storyteller–so I made one up: a djinn assembled from victims of a railway accident. The djinn weaves through time and space, explaining itself through the stories it feeds upon. A magical narrator won’t be to everyone’s taste, but the world is bigger than one writer’s important opinions about it, and I like books that find a way to recognise the fact.
Most of the book’s crazier human twists are a matter of record. Dead Water contains (among other things), a coup, a polar expedition, a world war and a tsunami. These are the tips of the research iceberg–the things I absolutely could not omit.
The world of the containers needed different tools. There are several games and Easter eggs sewn through the book. Pay attention to the contents page, and if you have a smart-phone, try reading those QR Codes, too. Most are decorative, but a couple do matter. You’ll have to find out for yourself which they are. The idea was not to be clever for the sake of it, but to suggest that the non-living world of boxes, cranes and ships has its stories, too, its myths, and maybe–just maybe–its dreams.
Martin McGrath loses his copy of Dead Water.
James Flint reviews Dead Water for the Guardian
Anyone familiar with Simon Ings’s previous novel, The Weight of Numbers, which interweaved dozens of stories to show the mathematical logic behind the workings of fate, or indeed his non-fiction study of the evolution of the eye, would know to expect something discursive from this latest novel. But Dead Water, though a slimmer volume, seems to cover even more ground than its predecessors, and at a greater velocity. While Ings puts many story strands into play, it is shipping – and its dark corollary, piracy – that really drives and defines this book. Ings’s ambition is to write from the point of view of the quiet circulation of sea-borne goods that underpins our globalised economy, and the behaviour of all the characters is deliberately in thrall to these flows.
Soon we’re in a strange land where fragments of contemporary philosophy are stitched together with what feel like lost scenes from Robert Ludlum or Ian Fleming. It’s indicative of Ings’s skill that he makes this blend of adventure story and treatise thoroughly compelling.
The action revolves around three main characters: Roopa Vish, an Indian police probationer so obsessed by bringing to justice a powerful gangster that she ends up sleeping with him; Eric Moyse, a shipping magnate, whose brilliantly devious shipping line within a shipping line allows him to hide the world’s most toxic wastes; and David Brooks, an intelligence officer turned pirate double agent, whose orthopaedic shoe and total amorality make him a villain worthy of Bond.
Although the novel starts out a little awkwardly, using the alchemical symbol of the ouroborus and a magical realism device in the form of a pair of vapourised twins to link the various threads, the tale toughens up as Ings’s talents as both thriller writer and science writer come to the fore.
The ouroborus may be a convenient shorthand for the novel’s dynamic, but the central idea that Ings is trying to elucidate is much more rigorous than a mere literary device. It is the discovery, formulated in a moment of clarity by one of the characters on the doomed airship expedition to the North Pole that opens the novel, that waves form, not just at the interface of air and water, but at the interfaces between layers of water – or any gases or liquids – of different densities.
Ings uses this apparently abstruse idea as the engine of his fiction. All the characters, all the stories, are thus located at the interfaces between cultural layers of different densities. And all the characters, whatever their individual wishes and desires, have their destinies moulded by the waves that form there. While they think they are making their own choices, they’re in fact borne along by currents over which they have absolutely no control. Indeed, when they try to break away from these forces, they find themselves falling foul of another concept that Ings brings into play: that of “cavitation”, understood as what happens when a propeller finds itself turning half in air and half in water – or between two layers of water of different density. Instead of producing propulsion, it creates mere foam: “generating empty space within a solid body”.
This is one of the meanings of the “dead water” of the title; it is also the device that Ings uses to create dramatic tension in the absence of any deeper form of self-determination. While the characters are in thrall to forces beyond their ken or control, they do not know this, and as readers we can only look on in horror tinged with a terrible sense of inevitability as Roopa Vish plunges herself ever deeper into the underworld web which will eventually ensnare her; as Eric Moyse tries and fails to vocalise his feelings for the women he’s loved from afar his entire life; as David Brooks manipulates his glamorous but confused daughter for his own ends over and over again.
Dead Water is not as grand a work as The Weight of Numbers, but conceptually it is even more ambitious and once it hits its stride, it displays a subtle and persistent power that confirms Ings as one of the very few British writers to be both contemporary and genuinely challenging.
