Most days the rain is rough and heavy, the sun a rare sight, or at least that is the case in Julia Armfield’s new novel, Private Rites. Her book follows the Carmichael sisters, Isla, Irene, and Agnes, who grew up in the Downs of England, in a house that was built to weather the worst of the planet’s catastrophic climate change. Ironically, though the building was strong on the outside, it was weak on the inside: for the sisters, growing up was a chaotic affair. Now, as adults who’ve grown distant from one another, the three are reunited by the revelation of their father’s passing. Armfield’s novel attends to the complicated process, for those who are left behind, of navigating life after death. Meanwhile, as the sisters trudge, step by step, through their messy lives, the world might really be ending outside.
There’s a lot of complexity here, and Armfield’s narrative portrays the ins and outs of family relationships in a deeply moving way; they look and feel like relationships found in real life. She achieves this by utilizing interchanging perspectives throughout the novel, highlighting the sisters’ distinct forms of separation, and exploring their pent-up emotions from the inside. This device also highlights each sisters’ queer experience, which Armfield – a queer woman herself – writes with familiar ease. While the film and literary industries tend to struggle along these lines – depicting such lifestyles without stigma, without framing queerness as a character’s defining trait – this story’s three sapphic sisters are much more than their sexuality; at bottom, all they are really in search for is love and connection.
One of the most fascinating viewpoints Armfield provides is that of the city itself, which parallels the status of the sisters’ bond. While the three grew up in the Downs, their story is set in a dysfunctional London, “The City” acting as a character overseeing the doomed reality of a future not terribly far off from our own.
Remember this: the world as it once was. The way things appear in the instant before they go under: first assured, then shipwrecked.… There is a horror movie adage that people are always running up stairs when they should be jumping out windows, but what is a person supposed to do when all obvious exits are underwater?
The book is full of such echoes – of lost ideas, of a world as it was known, pre-cataclysm. Characters experience a scarcity of organic foods; water levels continue to rise; every living thing feels driven to search for hope in hopeless times.
Across the span of the novel, an eerie question recurs: “What is the point of living if the world is rapidly approaching uninhabitability?” Though this reality is already determined in Private Rites, the real world – our world – still has time to turn back the climate clock. For close to a millennium, people have raised speculations regarding the dangers of rising ocean levels. Armfield’s masterful depiction of an Earth in peril, in what amounts to eco-fiction’s latest cannonball, sounds alarm bells for all to hear. The book is, in part, a call-to-action to the world outside its own pages.
A shining light through the heavy clouds of rain in this narrative are the paired themes of connection and the basic human need to love and be loved. The moments in which the characters are most elated are those in which they interact in palpably human ways, recognizing one another as more than merely meets the eye. It’s the very last speck of a reason to keep going, of carrying on, despite it all.
The question to ask now is not what did Julia Armfield succeed in, here, but rather what did she fail to do? There is very little to critique in the novel, other than Armfield’s occasional tendency to overload the reader with information. The setting is constructed in a way that encapsulates the story’s skewed reality. While the novel may sometimes overwhelm the reader, there’s something to be said for enabling them to assume the troubled perspectives of such troubled characters. All of it makes for a story that not only defies stereotypes – about family, about the planet – but helps to create a new template for the new stories our ever-changing world demands. The ominous twists and turns of Private Rites make it a perfect read for those who enjoy dark fiction and environmental dystopia, a version of our world that still wishes for the sun to stay shining.
Valentine Wollnik is a young writer residing in Orange County. She is getting ready to continue her writing career at California Polytechnic San Luis Obispo.
Orange County Review of Books 