Benjamin Warner

Traffic is crawling on the highway on your evening commute, then comes to a complete stop. You sit there for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, an hour, and haven't budged an inch. There are nothing but cars ahead of you as far as the eye can see. You figure there must be an accident, but hear no sirens, and see no emergency vehicles. Turning to the radio for an update, you get nothing but static on every station. Although you're more than 10 miles from home, you abandon your car on the highway and make your way home on foot.

On your journey home, things become more strange. You pass by known streams and ponds, but they are completely dry. Not so much of a drop of water remains. Along the way home you notice that the power is out everywhere, and when you arrive home you are faced not only with a lack of electricity, but a lack of water, too.

Such is the set-up in Benjamin Warner's new novel "Thirst". Readers aren't told exactly what happened. We're as "in the dark" (see how I did that?) as the characters in Warner's book. All we know is that there's no electricity, all the water has mysteriously vanished, and it's insanely HOT outside. There's a total vacuum for official information from any sort of media or government officials, and emergency services are AWOL. I don't think I need to include a spoiler alert for you to guess that things are about to get real very quickly. Long after folks have ransacked the grocery stores and have finished drinking juice from the cans of beans to stay alive, suburban niceties have been left by the wayside in favor of [b:Lord of the Flies|7624|Lord of the Flies|William Golding|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327869409s/7624.jpg|2766512]- style behavior (albeit slow-moving behavior because people are weak and it's so darn hot).

This isn't my favorite genre, but Warner captured my interest with the human behavior side of the story. He makes us ponder at what point in our struggle for survival do we start doing things we would consider unimaginable under normal circumstances (whether that be theft, murder, or drinking salsa juice). He also explores the cross-over from "it'll be okay, we just need to wait it out" to "I'm going crazy, what am I doing to do!?" The middle part of the story was fascinating in this regard.

He lost me a bit at the end as the main character starts seriously hallucinating (I had the same problem with the end of [b:Sweetland|24778574|Sweetland|Michael Crummey|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1445488994s/24778574.jpg|27406941]) and the book has some serious plot holes that perhaps a more experienced novelist would have closed.

I'd recommend this for those who like post-apocalyptic fiction or even those who like to ponder questions of morality.

3 stars

Thank you to NetGalley and Bloomsbury USA for a galley of this book in exchange for an honest review.



… (meer)

I have been reading a lot of dystopian novels recently, some of them a lot better than the rest. Sadly this was not one of the better examples. I bought it at the newly refurbished flagship branch of Foyle’s on Charing Cross Road where they were offering it at half price. I realise now that they were probably ashamed to have it in the store.

The basic premise is that following a sudden infrastructure failure, an American city finds itself cut off, without power or running water, and, predictably, civilisation turns out to be more fragile than previously imagined. Within days, the hitherto neighbourly society crumbles and it becomes everyone for themselves.

All rather tired as plot material goes. I did initially think that there might be a new twist here, but I suspect that Warner lacked the literary wherewithal to bring it off.… (meer)

I've belonged to a post-apocalyptic book club for quite a few years now, so I've become quite familiar with this genre. (Although, I read this one all on my own, unaffiliated with any club meetings!) And, I have to admit, after a while it begins to feel like many of the books in this genre (post-apocalyptic literary fiction) have more similarities than differences.

For me, 'Thirst' reminded me in tone most of Edan Lepucki's 'California' (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1116688427) and Karen Walker's 'Age of Miracles.' (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/357784277). I think what it has in common with those (and, perhaps more obviously, with McCarthy's 'The Road' (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/26356264) and the superior melancholy of Shute's 'On The Beach' (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/563246518)) is that the apocalyptic event is a phenomenon which isn't of primary concern to the book. They're not the stories where man has to figure out solutions and triumph over adversity. The real focus is on the quotidian details of survival (or the failure to survive). It's about the slow decay of the characters' lives and relationships, paralleling the decay of the world around them.

(The extended descriptions of the physical and mental effects of thirst also brought to mind parts of Monica Byrne's 'Girl in the Road' (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1406948305)).

Of course, each of these books is almost required to come up with at least a slightly-new twist on what the trigger for the final disaster might be. In 'Thirst,' one day, inexplicably (and it will remain unexplained, so don't wait for that), open bodies of fresh water combust and disappear, leaving behind a hot, dry and dusty land. When it happens, Eddie is stuck in a traffic jam and ends up having to run home, concerned about his wife, Laura. The couple are reunited, but everything is far from OK, and they - and their neighbors - begin to realize the true scope of the disaster. Anything drinkable is suddenly the one and only desperately-needed commodity, and ethics and morals erode in the face of duress.

Many thanks to Bloomsbury and NetGalley for the opportunity to read. I'll definitely be recommending this one to my aforementioned book club. As always, my opinions are solely my own.
… (meer)

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.… (meer)