This book captures the feeling of oppressive summer very well, with a very claustrophobic, close, undercurrent of dread and foreboding, as well as its imagery pf physical sickness and mental and emotional anguish. In this way, it is similar to Nobber by Oisín Fagan. Also in common with Nobber is a disturbing sexual undertone and the idea that with hot weather comes loose morals a la Emily, the mother in Atonement. This seems especially true of adult men and their creepy obsessions with younger and/or immature girls. In The Water Cure, Llew is interested in Lia, clearly at least partly because she’s “forbidden” and also naïve and pliable. In Nobber, this same dynamic shows up between the traveling merchant and Mary. He explicitly tells her she is the perfect age for desirability – 16 – and seems to see her clear mental illness as an extra layer of desirability, rather than a sign that she might not be able to give proper consent, at least in her current state (but it’s set in fourteenth century Ireland, so it’s not like there was much concern for women’s consent then anyway).
The oppressive heat has a different character in The Water Cure and Nobber. The summer in Nobber is dry and dusty, and throat-clogging where the summer in The Water Cure is humid, sticky, and throat-tightening. There is abundant water for the sisters in The Water Cure, as the name suggests, and every instance it is mentioned, it has a different significance, which was a variant which kept me interested while I was reading.
I find the comparison with The Virgin Suicides to be a half-accurate choice. I mostly found The Virgin Suicides disturbing because of the group of boys shamelessly stalking those sisters and the romanization of their captivity by their parents and their interpretation of religion as well as their eventual suicides. Their captivity became a creepy metaphor for their repressed sexuality that, if given free reign, would have rightfully belonged to the stalker boys. The Water Cure also focuses on sisters and their forced and semi-religious cult-like captivity by their parents. But in this case, instead of stalking, their boundaries are violated by men breaching the literal, physical boundaries of their captivity. The repressed sexuality of Lia becomes a thing that is given out of curiosity, even though it is clear that Llew expects it of her, much like the stalker boys of the Lisbon sisters in The Virgin Suicides. In the end, both sets of sisters take agency and end their captivity, thereby also escaping the creepiness of the men/boys who sexualized them. I disagree with the comparisons to The Handmaid’s Tale, apart from the imagery of female captivity and the eventual push against culty patriarchal power structures.
This is more of a comparison than a review, but so if you liked reading Nobber and The Virgin Suicides, you will probably also like The Water Cure.
