Tim Jones
Vividwater by Jacqueline Owens (Four Elements Press, 2025), 259pp, $35
Water. It can kill us by drowning, carry hundreds of us off in floods—yet the lack of it can be even more devastating. In Jacqueline Owens’ new novel Vividwater, Aotearoa is beset by drought, though we’re still not as badly off as many parts of the world. Water is to the world of Vividwater what dairy is to Aotearoa today—something we produce for export, notably to China. The term ‘vividwater’ refers to a top-of-the-line water grade, leaving clearwater and treatedwater and dairywater in both the metaphorical and literal dust.
Jacqueline Owens’ protagonist Alex Pym—her surname one of a number of literary and author references—works as a mnemopath, a highly skilled rememberer, for WaiOra, the water trading bureau, who are top dogs of the Wellington bureaucracy. Miraka Atawhai, the outfit that runs the dairy industry, are very much in their shadow (sorry, Fonterra—you had a good run!).
While the ‘scavvos’ and ‘aggros’ of this new society die of thirst or demand water with menaces, WaiOra, with its close trading relationship with China’s ZhenShui corporation, is sitting about as pretty as it’s possible to get in this parched country: extra water rations for staff, sweetheart deals for the top brass.
Alex isn’t part of the top table, but she’s in the room, standing and looking enviously on. She’s an aide-de-camp to her boss Ross Mulholland, one of those who do sit at the top table, and so her status and her water ration depend substantially on how known bullshit artist Ross fares in international water deals and inter-office politics, where the lairy Jarred and the fake-friendly Cushla are their great adversaries. Meanwhile, charismatic Jamie Arohanui speaks for iwi struggling in the wairohe, also referred to as waterservations; he comes across initially as a near-future Brian Tamaki clone, but it turns out there is more to him than that.
The foreground of this novel is well and closely described. Alex is an engaging protagonist: sharp-tongued, sharp-minded, but often having to hide her true thoughts and real skills to preserve her place in the hierarchy. As for her colleagues and adversaries, anyone who has spent time in and around a bureaucracy, or indeed around the office of any medium to large organisation, will know these types—the flatterers, the deceivers, and even the folks who are genuinely committed to doing the best job they possibly can, and would just like the flatterers and deceivers to leave them alone so they can get on with the actual mahi.
Lawrence Jones, Alex’s old uni boyfriend, a genius hydrologist, is back in Aotearoa after working for ZhenShui in China for many years. Now he lives in Karori, which in this novel is a gated community of the elite, those with water rations Alex can only dream of. When Alex and Lawrence reconnect, the full machinations of the plot begin.
Vividwater works very well as a thriller, though I was less convinced by it as a science fiction novel—more on that below. But I also want to praise the characterisation. Not only is Alex a very engaging protagonist—believable and consistent in her strengths, her flaws, and her reactions to events—but I thought Lawrence was particularly well characterised. It’s all too easy to make the ‘unworldly genius inventor’ character in a novel a one-dimensional cliché, but the distress in Lawrence’s past, and how that affects him in the present, is effectively revealed and very well portrayed in extracts like these:
He looks away and I see the awkward teenager who confided in me after the first year in the halls, the kid dumped in that awful home after his parents died during the First Great Drought. Even more of an outsider than me, in other words.
Lawrence is the only music-obsessed character I’ve ever met in a novel who organises his vinyl collection in the order considered correct by this reviewer—to make that plot-relevant is a cunning piece of work by the author. The secondary and tertiary characters, even those that play a small role in the narrative, are also well portrayed and differentiated.
As I hope you’ve gathered by now, I enjoyed Vividwater a lot and, while the novel works on its own terms, it also clears the runway for an intended three-part series. It’s a real Wellington novel in both its setting and the way in which the geography and bureaucracy of the city intersect.
There are a couple of areas where I don’t think the novel is so successful: a minor irritant and a more significant issue, although the author has addressed the latter in the novel’s publicity material. The minor irritant is that there are many instances of Alex comparing things to old YouTube clips. As Alex is a professional memoriser, I have no trouble believing that she can remember lots of old YouTube clips, but I found that these references kept taking me out of the world of the novel and back to our world. Maybe I just watch too much YouTube, but I do think that issue could have been easily fixed.
A more substantial weakness, in my view, is that life in this near-permanent drought, relieved only occasionally by rains so rare they are individually named—the Excelsior Rains, the Celestial Rains—is too cosy, too close to the life we have now. That may seem an odd criticism of a world in which a civil servant can get mugged or killed for their water ration on their route from Oriental Bay (known in the world of the novel as Oriental Gulch) to the CBD.
Nevertheless, despite the water scavengers and the permaprotest outside WaiOra HQ, the waterservations and the ruthless enforcers of WaiOra’s HydroCrimes unit, society in this novel is not as different as I would have expected from our current society, given the existential severity of the drought this near-future world is suffering through. Alex used to work in HydroCrimes, and that’s vividly described:
I have a sudden image, sharp as an icicle, the converted underground carpark, pulsing with a hundred computers, screens flashing bright neon, throbbing in time with the headache at the edge of my temples … All for a minimally higher grade of water ration and a quarterly visit from senior management, gracing us with a pep talk and a tray of muffins that no-one ever touched because sugar makes you thirsty.
In an Author’s Note, Owens states ‘Whereas most dystopias are set after society has collapsed, I wanted to write about one where people are keeping up appearances.’ That’s a very accurate description of this novel. But, without water, humans soon die—so people will put themselves in terrible danger, put themselves at any risk, to get what they will die without. As I write, the nightly news reports the horribly efficient trap into which the people of Gaza have been forced by their colonisers: seek food and water and be shot, or avoid seeking rations and die.
Lack of water kills even faster than lack of food. In Vividwater, the drought has lasted for decades, yet the stratification of this thirst-driven society appears as though it has been settled for some time. The scavengers scavenge for water, the aggros chase and threaten, the protesters outside the doors of WaiOra turn up every day to protest (which is desperately thirsty work!) and the various grades of citizen wish they had better water rations, but mostly stay within their lanes, plotting to become part of the water-rich elite, some day.
I think such a society would break down much quicker and more dramatically than Vividwater portrays. The depiction of a small elite that sustains itself from the misery of others is all too accurate, but the measures used to protect that elite lifestyle would in practice be much more drastic than those shown here, I believe. So that cosiness required some suspension of disbelief on my part. But nevertheless the novel amply succeeds in its own terms. This is an engaging, well-told story full of strong characterisation. As in the best thrillers, not only does interesting and exciting stuff happen, but it happens in ways that tell us more about the characters and progressively reveal the secrets of the novel’s world, casting a new light on what we, and Alex, thought we knew. By the end of the novel, Alex has come a long way and opened an intriguing new front in her quest for answers.
An effective technique of science fiction writing is to begin the narrative focused on the protagonist’s immediate problems and set up a series of progressively larger revelations about the nature of the science-fictional world the protagonist inhabits, all driven by the protagonist’s attempts to resolve those initial problems and the trouble that then leads to. Despite my reservations about one aspect of the world-building, Jacqueline Owens uses this technique very effectively in Vividwater. This novel deserves a sequel, and in fact, two sequels have been announced. I am looking forward to reading both of them.
TIM JONES lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. His novel Emergency Weather was published by The Cuba Press in 2023. Other recent books include the poetry collection New Sea Land (Mākaro Press, 2016) and the climate fiction novella Where We Land (The Cuba Press, 2019). He is a climate change activist.
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