Between Disasters
Tara Menon, Under Water
Summit Books, 224pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781398549159
reviewed by Matilda Sykes
In 2016, Amitav Ghosh posed the question ‘What is it about climate change that the mention of it should lead to banishment from the preserves of serious fiction?’. A decade on, Richard Powers’ longlisted Booker Prize Bewilderment (2021) and Stephen Markley’s The Deluge (2023), as well as university syllabi dedicated solely to climate-change fiction and the recent inauguration of the Climate Fiction Prize, show that ‘cli-fi’, if nothing else, is flourishing. Tara Menon’s debut novel is a welcome addition to our growing stacks of ‘serious fiction’ about the Anthropocene’s deadliness to human and non-human life. Under Water’s narrative travels between two recent major natural disasters — the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami (2004) and Hurricane Sandy (2012) — however, to Menon’s credit, the book is as interested in ‘slow violence’ as it is the seismic and spectacular.
Under Water centres on two best-friends, Marissa and Arielle. After Marissa’s mother is hit and killed by a florist delivery van, she and her father relocate to Thailand, where Marissa discovers Arielle. We meet the pair in adolescence, swimming with manta rays, ‘diving among the corals’, and ‘losing [them]selves in the trees’ on the private island off the mainland (restricted to marine researchers like Marissa’s father). Otherwise, they haunt the mainland beachfront (where Arielle’s mother’s hotel is located), stashing chilli in the more lecherous clientele’s ketchup and freeing crustaceans on tourist’s stomachs. They are interested in, enraged by, men. They occasionally bicker and prickle but are ultimately indivisible — until the wave arrives, wounding Marissa, killing Arielle (and approximately 230,000 others).
Marissa is catapulted into depression, dissociation, and insurmountable grief. In little bids to reanimate her past, New York-dwelling adult Marissa self-harms — ‘I step on a shard and wince’, ‘I suck on [chilli] a thousand tiny needles pricking’. Self-abuse quickly escalates into a wish for annihilation: ‘I want to be where the earth convulses again’, Marissa admits, ‘where it brings people to their knees’. As Hurricane Sandy tears through Manhattan, she runs straight into its path but is ultimately saved by a vision of Arielle.
While adult Marissa is detached, even misanthropic, she still finds commune possible in the world of literature. (Like Menon, she is an English Literature graduate.) The book begins with three epigraphs from George Eliot, Rachel Carson, and Emily Dickinson. The black page is a visual echo of Carson’s ‘black night of extinction’ (and perhaps Sterne’s originary inked ‘Poor Yorick!’ page).
Under Water teems with literary allusion: philology, onomastics, etymology, mythology; further epigraphs from Ovid, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Wordsworth, D. H. Lawrence; passages from The Waves, Tess of the D’Urbevilles, Frankenstein, Moby-Dick. It’s remarkable just how many books Menon fits in her own 213 pages without stifling the narrative or thinning her own voice. Importantly, these metatexts are readily intelligible to both the canonically-versed and uninitiated reader thanks to generous, self-sustaining quotations.
Tennyson’s elegy is in the marrow of Menon’s novel — after Arielle’s death, Marissa reads ‘In Memoriam every night’. Under Water makes plain its aim to stage a particular grief overlooked in the novel:
Menon cleverly integrates In Memoriam’s psychological landscape in all its paralysis, trauma, and loss of sense of selfhood. ‘I seem to fail out my blood’, writes Tennyson, ‘And grow incorporate with thee’ — Marissa, stalked by Arielle’s ghost, so too grows incorporate. While Marissa and Arielle’s friendship is persuasively complex, it can at times seem a little cool, a little glassy. They fight and sulk realistically but elements of adolescent female friendship — silliness, grossness, embarrassment — feel under-represented. As with In Memoriam, Marissa’s retrospective idealising impulse — ‘Arielle can walk into a room and stun it into wordlessness’ — might be the point here, the beloved entering paradiso. But without these giddier moments the girls’ young bond can feel oddly sedate, the dispositional difference between youthful and mature Marissa slightly too slight.
Menon’s prose style is measured, often reportorial, but always curiously sheening. Lush, colourful Phuket might be innately difficult to render blandly, but the same glinting prose characterises Menon’s New York City: ‘the green grass shimmers in the sun and makes my head ache’. At first glance, a sentence like this appears so stripped-back as to seem almost bland, but here Menon earns her simplicity through sound, the thick sibilance itself a kind of sonic glare or ‘shimmer’. Stylistic restraint works especially well when we reach the tsunami itself. As Ghosh puts it, ‘to treat the weather events that we are now experiencing […] as magical or surreal would be to rob them of precisely the quality that makes them so urgently compelling’. Menon allows the natural phenomenon’s narrative improbability to speak for itself:
The most affecting moments result from Menon’s attentiveness to incidental characters (such as these two sisters ‘combing through the sand for shells’). Just before the wave arrives, we meet a baby: ‘She tilts her little head sideways to look up at her mother and the hat slips off […] The woman catches it, puts it back on the baby’s head, and fastens the elastic strap around her chin.’ With disaster impending, this understated act of compassion is gutting to read (even before we discover the baby’s fate). Tender portraits like these bring embedded statistics — ‘Of the nearly quarter of a million people who died […] estimates suggest a third and a half were children’ — back to life.
Between disasters we uncover the ‘quiet, subtle, humdrum’ devastations: coral bleaching; manta ray killings; ‘a turtle […] choked on a plastic bag’; ‘a warbler […] in the grass, dead’; the extinction of the Carolina parakeet (‘women liked feathers in their hats’). Insects, birds, fish, monkeys, elephants, flies, dogs, cats, squirrels, rats, manta rays, crowd the book, an animal appearing every few pages at least. True to life, when the storm approaches and the earthquake hits, the animals flee long before the humans learn what’s coming (an escaping elephant ‘nearly trampling the cars’). By suffusing the book with animals, their sudden and total disappearance is chilling, humanity’s hubristic vulnerability thrown into stark relief.
Menon’s movement between not one but two historically devastating disasters is dexterous and effective; the book de-sensationalises isolated events, directing attention instead toward the broader irregularities and grim promises of the natural world. As I read the book, the last stanza of Hölderlin’s poem ‘Andenken’ (‘Remembrance’) kept coming to mind:
Menon’s self-professed ‘deep and varied’ research (‘meteorological reports, academic research papers, IPCC reports, research trips to Thailand’, firsthand accounts’, the list goes on) results in a rich, realistic world. By focusing on the comparatively recent past rather than presenting an apocalyptic vision of the future, Menon points out, quietly, that which ‘is lasting’ — for it is platitudinous but true that we cannot hope to miss that which we never knew existed.
Under Water centres on two best-friends, Marissa and Arielle. After Marissa’s mother is hit and killed by a florist delivery van, she and her father relocate to Thailand, where Marissa discovers Arielle. We meet the pair in adolescence, swimming with manta rays, ‘diving among the corals’, and ‘losing [them]selves in the trees’ on the private island off the mainland (restricted to marine researchers like Marissa’s father). Otherwise, they haunt the mainland beachfront (where Arielle’s mother’s hotel is located), stashing chilli in the more lecherous clientele’s ketchup and freeing crustaceans on tourist’s stomachs. They are interested in, enraged by, men. They occasionally bicker and prickle but are ultimately indivisible — until the wave arrives, wounding Marissa, killing Arielle (and approximately 230,000 others).
Marissa is catapulted into depression, dissociation, and insurmountable grief. In little bids to reanimate her past, New York-dwelling adult Marissa self-harms — ‘I step on a shard and wince’, ‘I suck on [chilli] a thousand tiny needles pricking’. Self-abuse quickly escalates into a wish for annihilation: ‘I want to be where the earth convulses again’, Marissa admits, ‘where it brings people to their knees’. As Hurricane Sandy tears through Manhattan, she runs straight into its path but is ultimately saved by a vision of Arielle.
While adult Marissa is detached, even misanthropic, she still finds commune possible in the world of literature. (Like Menon, she is an English Literature graduate.) The book begins with three epigraphs from George Eliot, Rachel Carson, and Emily Dickinson. The black page is a visual echo of Carson’s ‘black night of extinction’ (and perhaps Sterne’s originary inked ‘Poor Yorick!’ page).
Under Water teems with literary allusion: philology, onomastics, etymology, mythology; further epigraphs from Ovid, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Wordsworth, D. H. Lawrence; passages from The Waves, Tess of the D’Urbevilles, Frankenstein, Moby-Dick. It’s remarkable just how many books Menon fits in her own 213 pages without stifling the narrative or thinning her own voice. Importantly, these metatexts are readily intelligible to both the canonically-versed and uninitiated reader thanks to generous, self-sustaining quotations.
Tennyson’s elegy is in the marrow of Menon’s novel — after Arielle’s death, Marissa reads ‘In Memoriam every night’. Under Water makes plain its aim to stage a particular grief overlooked in the novel:
It is not acceptable to endlessly grieve someone who was just a friend. You must get over it after a period of time. […] Or else they ask, Were you in love with her? As if that could be the only explanation for this kind of grief.
Menon cleverly integrates In Memoriam’s psychological landscape in all its paralysis, trauma, and loss of sense of selfhood. ‘I seem to fail out my blood’, writes Tennyson, ‘And grow incorporate with thee’ — Marissa, stalked by Arielle’s ghost, so too grows incorporate. While Marissa and Arielle’s friendship is persuasively complex, it can at times seem a little cool, a little glassy. They fight and sulk realistically but elements of adolescent female friendship — silliness, grossness, embarrassment — feel under-represented. As with In Memoriam, Marissa’s retrospective idealising impulse — ‘Arielle can walk into a room and stun it into wordlessness’ — might be the point here, the beloved entering paradiso. But without these giddier moments the girls’ young bond can feel oddly sedate, the dispositional difference between youthful and mature Marissa slightly too slight.
Menon’s prose style is measured, often reportorial, but always curiously sheening. Lush, colourful Phuket might be innately difficult to render blandly, but the same glinting prose characterises Menon’s New York City: ‘the green grass shimmers in the sun and makes my head ache’. At first glance, a sentence like this appears so stripped-back as to seem almost bland, but here Menon earns her simplicity through sound, the thick sibilance itself a kind of sonic glare or ‘shimmer’. Stylistic restraint works especially well when we reach the tsunami itself. As Ghosh puts it, ‘to treat the weather events that we are now experiencing […] as magical or surreal would be to rob them of precisely the quality that makes them so urgently compelling’. Menon allows the natural phenomenon’s narrative improbability to speak for itself:
The sea is pulling swiftly away from us, revealing meters and meters of sand that we have never seen before […] Pink and orange corals stand exposed on the seabed […] “See the fish!’, shouts the girl, dropping all her shells. “Fish!” her little sister shouts proudly. They are right: the sea has left so quickly it has forgotten the fish.
The most affecting moments result from Menon’s attentiveness to incidental characters (such as these two sisters ‘combing through the sand for shells’). Just before the wave arrives, we meet a baby: ‘She tilts her little head sideways to look up at her mother and the hat slips off […] The woman catches it, puts it back on the baby’s head, and fastens the elastic strap around her chin.’ With disaster impending, this understated act of compassion is gutting to read (even before we discover the baby’s fate). Tender portraits like these bring embedded statistics — ‘Of the nearly quarter of a million people who died […] estimates suggest a third and a half were children’ — back to life.
Between disasters we uncover the ‘quiet, subtle, humdrum’ devastations: coral bleaching; manta ray killings; ‘a turtle […] choked on a plastic bag’; ‘a warbler […] in the grass, dead’; the extinction of the Carolina parakeet (‘women liked feathers in their hats’). Insects, birds, fish, monkeys, elephants, flies, dogs, cats, squirrels, rats, manta rays, crowd the book, an animal appearing every few pages at least. True to life, when the storm approaches and the earthquake hits, the animals flee long before the humans learn what’s coming (an escaping elephant ‘nearly trampling the cars’). By suffusing the book with animals, their sudden and total disappearance is chilling, humanity’s hubristic vulnerability thrown into stark relief.
Menon’s movement between not one but two historically devastating disasters is dexterous and effective; the book de-sensationalises isolated events, directing attention instead toward the broader irregularities and grim promises of the natural world. As I read the book, the last stanza of Hölderlin’s poem ‘Andenken’ (‘Remembrance’) kept coming to mind:
[…] But it is the sea
that gives memory, and takes it away,
and love also zealously fixes our eyes,
but what is lasting the poets provide.
Menon’s self-professed ‘deep and varied’ research (‘meteorological reports, academic research papers, IPCC reports, research trips to Thailand’, firsthand accounts’, the list goes on) results in a rich, realistic world. By focusing on the comparatively recent past rather than presenting an apocalyptic vision of the future, Menon points out, quietly, that which ‘is lasting’ — for it is platitudinous but true that we cannot hope to miss that which we never knew existed.