Gathering the Water

There's a utilitarian approach to reading historical novels, which presumes that such novels will be somehow "informative" or "instructional."  Some historical novels deliberately resist such readings, however, and Robert Edric's Gathering the Water (2006) is one of them.  Like J. M. Coetzee's The Master of Petersburg, Gathering the Water incorporates only so much historical detail as to impose a set of limit-points on the protagonist--here, a first-person speaker, Charles Weightman, writing a journal about his experiences in what is soon to be the Forge Valley Reservoir.  Although the novel is set in the late 1840s, there is little historical "color"; in fact, the narrator himself has little in the way of color.  He is not quite disembodied, but--like the protagonist of Edric's Cradle Song--strikes the reader as virtually anesthetized.  As the reader soon discovers, Weightman has been traumatized by the sudden death of his fiancee, although he also remains haunted by what is clearly an attraction to her sister.   His psychological plight finds a mirror in that of Mary Latimer, whose bluntness about her troubled relationship with her insane sister nevertheless conceals a deep, abiding guilt.  And both of their struggles find a metaphor in the transformation of the valley into a reservoir, an act that promises to erase history (and memory) entirely.

This is a bleak, constrained novel, rendered all the bleaker by Edric's refusal to write it as a drama of redemption.  To begin with, Weightman exists in a strange relationship to time. The chapters are undated journal entries, with some of the entries written immediately after the event and others clearly much later; this unsettling sense of temporal drift eventually characterizes Weightman's attitude to his work, which by the end of the novel becomes sloppy ("I had neglected to make several recent surveys, and a great deal else needed to be done" [187]).  Although we are occasionally given date markers, it is always hard to identify quite when Weightman is.  It is just as difficult for Weightman himself to identify his psychological location.  Early on, he describes his mental state after his fiancee's death as the "dark, uncharted territory of grief and longing" (50), and admits that his move to the valley was an attempt to find a "new start" in physical space that would produce a new start in mental space, an attempt that has clearly failed: "I see now, of course, that I placed too great an emphasis on this new beginning, and that those lesser endings continue to reverberate, that I feel their chills and tremors even now" (51).  Weightman's fantasy of the "new beginning," which he seeks by deliberately ending all of his other past relationships, presumes that mental territories can be easily evacuated--much as the Company presumes that the valley can be easily evacuated, with no particular trauma to the residents who must abandon their farms and sometimes their personal effects.  Even individuals who deeply resent the past find themselves still shaped by it, much as Mary Latimer cannot truly escape the valley.  By the end of the novel, when Weightman thinks of the valley residents, he is clearly thinking of his own mental decay: "I fear now that everyone here is wandering aimlessly in the endless puzzle of a cold and disappointing dream, and that all the certainties and comforts of life have been finally stripped away from them, leaving them lost and directionless, and with the rudiments of existence itself exposed and unbearably raw" (212).  This sense of a story unwinding, with life rendered naked and pointless, is counterpointed by the novel's end in winter instead of spring.  We are not heading towards rebirth here.  We are not, it seems, heading anywhere; the narrative moves towards an end, but the characters are all without a rudder. 

Even the ending seems not a conclusion, but merely a loop.  Mary Latimer, in despair, has committed suicide by drowning (one notes that there are no baptismal properties to this water).  Weightman's final entry describes "my dream of those nights" (248), which, from the verb tense, is clearly a dream that haunts him in an eternal present.  In the dream, he at first seems to glimpse the redemption that the novel has denied him (and her), a "drama of impossible resurrection" in which Mary slowly rises from "some underwater pedestal upon which she has for so long awaited her rescue, and in whose blinding, healing glow she now rises towards me" (250).  There's a confused Christianity at work here, with Mary a Lazarus-figure brought back from the dead by some mysterious force; embodying all of the novel's dead pasts, buried under literal and figurative water, Mary rises to the surface as the promise of the end to all trauma.  But in the novel's penultimate, paragraph-long sentence, the dream collapses:

And so where all of this is most real to me, where my heart beats its wildest in anticipation of what is to happen next, I stand and watch as the drowned woman comes level with the top of the dam, as she rises above it and looks directly at me, as she raises her arm to point to me, and then as she slowly opens her mouth to call out to me that she is saved and that I am her saviour, but where instead of the words there comes only more of the same dark water pouring like bile from her lips. (250)

Weightman desires to hear Mary announce not only her salvation, but his as well: by proclaiming him her "saviour," an obvious Christ-figure (and one has to wonder about the name "Mary" at this point), the dream Mary would grant Weightman an efficacy and significance that he has patently been lacking throughout the entire novel.  Weightman saves no-one and nothing, himself included.  And until its climax, the dream further proposes the possibility of resurrection, for Mary, for everything else which has been lost, and for himself--the saviour, after all, rose from the dead.  But instead of redemption and resurrection, there is only more of the novel's favorite symbol of obliteration.  It's no wonder that in the novel's final words, as Weightman records his awakening, he is entirely powerless, "unable to control to even the slightest degreee the violent tremor of my shaking chest and limbs" (250).