Review: No More Water Review, Hugh Arthur
By Luke Frostick
No More Water doesn’t work. It really doesn’t and that is a shame because the concept and setting are fascinating, but the book overall falls flat.
In brief, the story follows Jeder, an English businessman in the process of stealing from his company, and Nurettin who is attempting a Ponzi scheme that involves controlling the supply of water in the Euphrates. Obviously, thieves never prosper and No More Water is the tale of these men’s plans falling apart.
Okay, as mentioned, that is an intriguing set-up. However, the execution doesn’t work. The first place that it struggles is with the prose style. The book has numerous errors throughout and not due to stylistic choices, they’re straight-up errors. There are typos, spelling mistakes, vocabulary errors and fragments. I found myself instinctively reaching for the red pen to in-line edit. That this book was sent to a critic in this state shows a real failure on the part of its copy editor. Beyond the straightforward errors, sentences are often disjointed, wordy and have clunky composition. For instance, take the following paragraph about the tension two characters feel regarding their childless marriage:
“Maybe she had misread the contract which stated that she had to offer Nurettin a child without discussion or she mistook him to be more gracious and informal than he really was. Suddenly there was likely to be an explosion out of which context he would make his feelings known. Or else there was no advance on a hollow separation for a marriage that had not brought her the sense of closeness or security she had hoped it would. (p.105)”
While this sentence does express the character’s feeling, it is an unnecessarily dense segment of English and an odd use of both ‘mistook’ and ‘context’. Unfortunately, this is not an isolated segment.
In terms of technical problems, the dialog has very little natural flow to it and the perspective of the third person narrator lurches from character to character in a really jarring fashion. These aspects can be ascribed to a lack of editorial control, but unfortunately, the flaws in the book go beyond the technical. The pacing of the book is quite slow and things only get going in the last third, by far the best part of the novel. Moreover, everything is unnecessarily muddled. A mystery novel or thriller can be elevated by keeping the reader in the dark to build suspense. However, this book is just confusing, making it hard for the reader to establish the motivations or the stakes of the story. This fog of confusion is certainly not helped by the aforementioned prose issues. It also doesn’t really go anywhere, the plot doesn’t quite develop beyond the summary that I outlined at the beginning of the article.
The central characters of Jeder and Nurettin are actually solidly realised. However, the story has a bunch of superfluous characters who are much less well-defined and seem to be being set up for prominent roles in the story’s conclusion but fade away to be replaced by other characters introduced at the last minute.
All of this is a crying shame because the premise of the novel is exciting. A business thriller that deals with the grey zones between business, diplomacy, and security has the potential to tell a really gripping story. Moreover, the inclusion of large elements of environmental and water management is incredibly relevant and important in Turkey right now. In fact, it is when engaging with these elements that the book is at its strongest. The writer, Hugh Arthur, clearly has a strong grasp of issues surrounding water management both globally and specifically in Turkey and its southern neighbours, and there is some interesting material there, but it is not in a plot that lets that knowledge shine. Furthermore, the writer has some interesting views on Turkish politics and society and makes some articulate observations in the book. Though he does mistakenly refer to an investigation by the Turkish police as a “federal investigation,” which doesn’t exist in Turkey. Turkey is not governed by federalism…
No critic enjoys panning a book. This one in particular is trying to tell an important story of how environmental degradation and corruption march hand in hand in modern Turkey. I would love to see a further developed and refined version of this book. However, in its current state No More Water should never have made it to market.
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