'An emergency from its very first sentence ... A literary thriller that summons the survivalist terror ofThe Road' Patrick Somerville, author of This Bright River
On a searing summer Friday, Eddie Chapman has been stuck for hours in a traffic jam. There are accidents along the highway, but ambulances and police are conspicuously absent. When he decides to abandon his car and run home, he sees that the trees along the edge of a stream have been burnt, and the water in the stream bed is gone. Something is very wrong.
When he arrives home, the power is out and there is no running water. The pipes everywhere, it seems, have gone dry. Eddie and his wife, Laura, find themselves thrust together with their neighbours while a sense of unease thickens in the stifling night air.
Thirst takes place in the immediate aftermath of a mysterious disaster - the Chapmans and their neighbours suffer the effects of the heat, their thirst, and the terrifying realisation that no one may be coming to help. As violence rips through the community, Eddie and Laura are forced to recall secrets from their past and question their present humanity. In crisp and convincing prose, Ben Warner compels readers to do the same. What might you do to survive?
The action in Thirst is kicked off by something not so prosaic as a drought. Rather, the fresh water simply vanishes. The grid goes down, as does the network, and emergency services are so overwhelmed that they can't respond to the crash causing the enormous traffic snarl Eddie Chapman finds himself in. He doesn't know about the water yet. Frustrated at the delay, close to home, and wanting to avoid worrying his anxious wife, Laura, he leaves his car behind and jogs back to his house. On the way there, he notices that the stream he crosses is dry, the trees around it singed and ashy. And thus Eddie, Laura, and their suburban neighbors find themselves in an awful bind: unable to communicate with anyone besides the people they're in physical proximity to, no access to news or information, and no water during the steamy summer weather. How everyone deals with the circumstances they find themselves in is really what the book is about. How do you provide for yourself? Your neighbors? Strangers? The initial panic, the dwindling supply of liquids, the delirium as the dehydration kicks in...the pretense of civilization vanishes quickly.
This novel read, to me, of a mix of two books I've read recently: Jose Saramago's Blindness (which I loved), and Knut Hamsun's Hunger (which I hated). Like Blindness, the story follows a group of people cut off from the outside world in a place where rules and the social ties that bind are disintegrating after a catastrophic event. Like Hunger, the inability to meet basic needs of physical survival cause the characters to become delusional and therefore unreliable narrators. Thirst is better than Hunger, but not nearly as good as Blindness. The plot took a while to start moving, and I felt like it ultimately wrapped up a little too quickly. Less exposition at the beginning, more denouement at the end would have made it stronger. But it's engaging, and once I got into the thick of it I was intrigued and wanted to know what happened next. It's pretty quick to get through, and I enjoyed it. I'd recommend it to a friend interested in post-apocalyptic style literature, but don't think I'll end up re-reading it myself.
