Stillicide: A Novel

By Cynan Jones

A powerful climate crisis story about love and loss that offers a glimpse of a tangible future in which water is commodified and vulnerable to sabotage that is "close to perfect," "imaginative and far reaching," and "very human and deadly serious" (The Guardian).

Water is commodified. The Water Train that serves the city increasingly at risk of sabotage.

As news breaks that construction of a gigantic Ice Dock will displace more people than first thought, protestors take to the streets and the lives of several individuals begin to interlock. A nurse on the brink of an affair. A boy who follows a stray dog out of the city. A woman who lies dying. And her husband, a marksman: a man forged by his past and fearful of the future, who weighs in his hands the possibility of death against the possibility of life.

From one of the most celebrated writers of his generation, Stillicide is a moving story of love and loss and the will to survive, and a powerful glimpse of the tangible future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Catapult
• Release date: Nov 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781646220144

Book preview

THE WATER TRAIN

The boy’s hand opened and closed as if he reached for a glass of water but it was just the nerves dying through his body.

With the thick rain the blood from the wound ran a thin washed pink.

Nearby again a pheasant crowed, a klaxon call as they make before thunder.

The bullet had gone in at the boy’s jaw and removed that side.

Branner stood over the body, the rain hitting his hood, drumming out the last rush of the train. Heavy and rhythmic, heavy and rhythmic.

Felt the shudder drop from the ground as the train gained distance.

Still the boy’s hand gaped, a fish dying in the air.

The rain hit Branner’s hood. Hit. Hood. Made a shelter for his mind. A building he hadn’t stepped out of yet. It closed him off.

The uppermost side of the boy’s face was visible and perfect and untouched by the bullet.

Branner wore the earpiece out so he could hear the rain and the sergeant’s voice seemed to come from afar.

– It was a kid, Branner said at the mic.

*

There is the silence as of after a great push of wind.

They stand at the crest of the field, overlook the ocean, the pines that stand in their line of sight.

She tightens her grip when she feels his words start.

– I don’t want there to be pain.

Her hand tightens. Do not speak.

He wants to say, I do not want there to be time, to think of you in pain.

– I do not want time to think of you in pain.

The light intensifies, as if it grows in volume. Time. There is no movement to the air, but in the ground now a minute growing shake.

Then far in the distance the sea at the horizon seems suddenly to smooth, the way soft butter goes with the pass of a blunt knife.

She squeezes his hand, as if she silences the earth. Silences him.

I thought I would be stronger than this. Not this, not anger.

He is aware in the last seconds of her great dignified fear as the trees ahead of them explode. Explode with silence.

A bird crosses the sky. Lone and black. Burns mid-air, disintegrates to ash.

A split second before he wakes, the force comes through his eyes.

The dream is like a dry mouth.

The hiss in his earpiece brought Branner round, and he saw the red dot flash on the grid scanner in his hand. He was sheltered from the rain partially, pushed in against the willow at the fifty-metre line. The rain came down heavily. Subdued the dawn light.

The distraction was a relief. When he’d heard the doctor’s words, they seemed spoken through water. Had grown every moment since in volume and solidity. Seemed now to knock against the shell of the dream he’s had for weeks. A recurrence he braces for in sleep. The dream now like a premonition.

‘I’ve seen it,’ Branner said into his mic.

He watched the red dot shift across the scanner, hesitate, then apparently settle. A slight condensation come to the edges of the screen.

There was no way of knowing what the red dot was, but it was in the sector and big enough to trigger the sensors.

Deer. Dog. Man. If it was still alive and present when the water load passed, the defence guns of the train would fire automatically.

They weren’t taking any chances now. Attacks on the line had increased.

Branner had the choice to stay out of the way or neutralise the risk himself. He could take the shot, or, if he could identify it as nothing threatening, call it in to the tower and they could stand the train guns down.

‘Can you get there?’ The sergeant’s voice came through the earpiece, through the snap of rain on Branner’s hood.

‘I can get there,’ Branner replied. It was relatively close. The opposite side of the track.

‘Let the train guns take it,’ said the sergeant.

Branner felt the old scar on his jaw catch slightly against the nap inside his hood.

‘No. I’ll go.’

It will be an animal, Branner thought. There’s no need for it to pointlessly die.

The drops gathered and fell heavily from the long leaves of willow.

Branner checked his rifle and walked into the rain.

~

There was a slowness in the watch post. The rain patting on the corrugated roof.

The sergeant and the line officer watched Branner on the monitor – a green dot – zoomed in a few clicks. It was difficult for them to see only the green dot and not in their minds Branner himself.

Knowing about Branner’s wife made them think of him differently.

‘Where’s the train?’ The voice that broke abruptly into the room seemed to have no connection to the dot.

‘On time. Forty seconds to sector.’ The digits flicking.

The rain thickened, drumming the watch post. Thumping down.

‘Don’t you love summer?’ the sergeant said.

‘They should have built a gutter to the city,’ said the officer. ‘This rain. Not a train track.’

‘Well, we won’t run out.’

The sergeant felt the warmth of the coffee through the cup, mesmerised for a moment by the swirls on the surface of the liquid. The contained clatter of the runnelled rain.

The hostile red dot did not move away. It moved just sporadically in the same place.

‘It’s waiting,’ the sergeant guessed. Tried to sense something from the dot.

It was a dog last night, caught up in the bramble. Scruffy, thick-set mongrel thing.

‘Is the growth there cleared?’ he asked the line officer.

‘Eighteen months ago.’

Branner was leaving it late to get over the track. Why was he doing that?

A barely perceptible tremor started in the water that hung in the rain collector just outside. The sergeant looked for the tremor in his coffee cup.

‘They should just burn it away every year,’ he said.

He could never take his eyes from the counter in the last few seconds. The digits fluttering. Damn, he’s leaving it late.

They knew it was coming but their bodies tensed when the tone came on.

‘Okay,’ the sergeant said, into the comms. ‘Train in sector. You need to speed it up, John.’

~

Branner went over the track by one of the old footings of the pipeline that had taken water to the city before the train.

The memory thudded against the shell the dream made around his mind, a dull moth against bright glass. The time they met. Out here as a young soldier on patrol, before he transferred to the police. An activist group had bombed the pipe. He’d been one of the few still standing. Dragged drowning men from the spilled water.

She was with the medic team. He was the first person she had ever sewn up.

The rain had brought the biting insects out and they hung above the line in brief clouds, hypnotised by the high-pitched hum feeding back from the pressure converters.

There was a smell of wet metal and stone.

Branner was not connected properly to himself. He could not step out of the moment with her in his dream just before the trees exploded.

It was a muntjac we were eating, that day, he thought. Before the charge

Reviews for Stillicide

[bodachliath · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was the last of the 153 books I read in 2019, and was an interesting way to finish the year's reading. Like Jon McGregor's The Reservoir Tapes, this was commissioned for a BBC Radio 4 series of 15-minute dramas on Sunday evenings.

This is something of a departure for Jones, whose other books are set in the present day, in agricultural and coastal communities. It is a dystopia set in a Britain 30 to 40 years into the future, a country in which water supplies to the big city (London is never named) are a major problem - since water pipelines became a target for terrorists, water has been imported using heavily armoured trains, and a scheme has begun to harness icebergs to supply more.

The story is told in fragments, as each of the 12 parts (or episodes) has a different focus, and as with The Reservoir Tapes finding the links between them is easier when reading them in book form than when hearing radio versions at weekly intervals.

[arubabookwoman · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"People have always got on with it. Dystopia is as ridiculous a concept as Utopia."

This is a near-future post-apocalyptic/dystopian novel that, unlike many works of this genre, is quiet and lyrical. Climate change has caused water shortages, and water has become a valuable commodity. In a series of apparently unrelated vignettes we meet various characters, in various settings, each in more or less dire circumstances. The novel opens as a mercenary guard on the track carrying the "water train" to the city is sent to investigate a possible intruder along the tracks, with orders to shoot to kill if necessary. In other vignettes we meet a stray dog, two boys who adopt it, a nurse on a cancer ward, a reporter, an elderly couple who harvest limpets for food, the seashore now encroaching their home.

I liked this book a lot, and I think even those who are not fans of the dystopian/post-apocalyptic genre would find a lot to like here. The writing is beautiful, and part of the genius of the book is how it is put together with these unrelated parts that in the end, the author is able to pull together. A review on Amazon described it as "minimalist" and a "sparse apocalyptic slice of life," and these descriptions are apt. But it is very well-done.

And I learned a new word: "Stillicide--1. A continual dripping of water; 2. A right or duty relating to the collection of water from or onto adjacent land."

Recommended.

3 1/2 stars

[modioperandi · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Cynan Jones most recent novel Stillicide is a short sketch of a world yearning. Yearning for the scarcity of water and in that very scarcity the immediate way it trickles down to relationships from families to governments to forces at odds with control. In Stillicide we enter a future where water trains bring water and glaciers are moved to collect water. Within this climate future story Cynan Jones has written deeply human. Humane stories. Of them all my favorite is the boy whose lost brother is searching for his, their, dog. In Stillicide everything is on the razors edge. All is uncertian. The primary constant is, as Jones tells it in these stories, is hope and love.

Stillicide is a short novel. It is earnest and honest. It is cinematic in its script-like brief but beautifully detailed sentences. Of it all the breaks on the page. Sentence. Word. Paragraph. Break. It all adds to the urgency the feeling and beauty of this stellar book.

Highly recommend.

[mishker-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fresh water has become scarce and is now a commodity.  The Water Train brings water to the city, but is constantly being sabotaged and must be closely guarded.  Glaciers are now being towed in as a source of fresh water.  An Ice Dock must be constructed to support the giant glacier, moving entire communities in its wake.   As news of the displacement from the Ice Dock spreads, the lives of several people become entwined by the element that keeps us alive. 
Stillicide is defined as:  a continual dripping or the servitude of eavesdrop binding a servient tenement to receive from the dominant tenement rainwater from the eaves of a building located on the latter.  Stillicide is a collection of short stories all taking place within the same time frame around a future dystopian city in England struggling to receive fresh water.  At first, the stories all seem a bit disjointed, but they do give a good sense of place.  Through the eyes of the storytellers, a world where humans continue to live their daily lives as yet another catastrophe of our own making threatens to dismantle everything.  To make coffee, we harvest the respiration from trees, protests emerge as the impact of the Ice Dock is made imminent.  The writing creates the feeling of a slightly off-kilter normal or a boring dystopia.  Despite the world crashing down and the inherent risk of running out of fresh water, people are continuing on with their own drama, motivations and human needs.  As the stories continue, the connectedness becomes apparent and the power of nature over human life is shown.
This book was received for free in return for an honest review.

[pdcread · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It is the near future, not that far from where we are now, a place where water has become a scarce commodity

The city demands water, it is bought in on The Water Train and guarded by man and machine against sabotage.

Dry rivers mean that there is not enough water. Icebergs are calved and dragged south. A new Ice Dock is planned and then expanded, it will evict more people than was first thought. The city tenses as the protests start.

In this stark new world, people are trying to live; a marksman whose wife is dying, a woman meeting a lover. A man collecting limpets off the rocks, a boy looking for his brother who is searching for his dog.

All are uncertain about this bleak future.

This short dystopian novella is quite something. Jones writes with surgical precision, twelve short chapters fill in more detail about the harshness of this place through the eyes of his characters. He paints an outline sketch of a society that is on a knife-edge between surviving and failing, whilst still have very human and believable characters.

I thought it was a stunning book and I love the cover too. It has a sense of urgency in the writing. I think because it was conceived for radio first, and the limits of time in that medium, both constrain and liberate his writing.