Eiren Caffall’s All the Water in the World is a post-apocalyptic novel set in the near future in New York City. Floodgates have been installed on each side of the island to keep the city dry. Though storms bring water that drain into the subway system, the city itself is safe from sea water. This is where Nonie, 13, and her family live: on the roof of the American Natural History Museum (AMNH), which they call Amen. There they are safe from anyone roaming the streets. They have a garden that they tend and they shoot deer in Central Park.
Many of the residents are former Amen employees, who packed up artifacts and moved them to upper floors, away from potential flooding, noting in a Log Book where everything is. While their mother’s health declines due to kidney failure, Nonie and her sister Bix receive basic teaching from one of the other residents, which Nonie repeats to herself in sticky situations: “Who benefits? And why is that so?”
Nonie can sense rain coming, whether it will be a massive storm or just a sprinkle. She can feel the water inside of people, in their blood and tears and sweat. Interestingly, while Nonie can sense water, her older sister Bix is terrified of it. Nonie uses the Amen Log Book as a Water Log Book as well, writing her observations and thoughts on water in between the references to Amen collections.
But Nonie is unable to predict the “hypercane” (massive hurricane) that destroys their rooftop camp, breaches the floodgates, and puts the city underwater. Nonie, Bix, their father, who are white, and a Black man named Keller, escape in a birchbark canoe taken from one of Amen’s exhibits, and begin their journey to Nonie’s mom’s childhood home, up the Hudson River.
Nonie is intelligent beyond her age. The story is buoyed by her fascination with geological periods and her knowledge of what lived during each one. She lies under the skeleton of a blue whale in Amen and imagines the geological periods swirling around her “ocean”, from trilobites in the Ordovician scuttling around her body to a Dunkleosteus from the Devonian swimming above her. When they travel, she imagines their boat being carried on the back of a late Cretaceous turtle “three times the size of our canoe.” She regularly plays a game with Keller in which they briefly describe an organism and the other person has to guess what it is and what its Latin name is.
The book realistically captures the slow creep of climate change: before the flooding, Nonie’s parents had fuel and food rations, rolling blackouts, and limitations on local and international travel. Bix was born in a hospital with lights and doctors. Nonie was born three years later, at home in the dark. Eventually, martial law was imposed, but the army broke down and people were buffeted by one disaster after another; from sea level rise to massive hurricanes on the coast, from wildfire to drought inland.
As Chris Begley writes in his book The Next Apocalypse: The Art and Science of Survival, it’s unlikely that the more than 350 million people in the US would just disappear. He also notes that most of them have no experience with self-sufficiency, so would have to rely on others; you’d need a lot of gardens to feed that many people. In Caffall’s book, however, it seems as though there are only about 1,000 people left in New York and along the Hudson River. The Mosquito Borne, a highly infectious and untreatable illness, has taken many people. Many more have been lost to flooding and storms, and to pre-existing illnesses that can’t be treated. Others are said to have fled the coasts and travelled inland, where people have heard there are wildfires and other challenges. There’s even talk of a floating city out on the ocean, called the RV Sally Ride. Does this account for the entire population? Not entirely, but it is fiction after all.
The story is reminiscent of Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven. Like the Shakespearean troupe in the latter, Nonie and her group are on the classic hero’s journey. They meet both helpers and danger, and discover that travelling this strange, flooded world requires a level of trust in other people that’s hard to summon. They have to watch out for The Lost, people without a place to stay, who might attack them. They take risks by knocking on the doors of people they think can help, who take them in based on their own trust that the travellers don’t have the Mosquito Borne. Their group is also different because of their mixed race, whereas most travellers move in single-race groups.
All the Water in the World is about loss and community, about what happens when the world falls apart and we are left to trust those we don’t know. Nonie and her band of travellers must risk death to find food and water: for each positive encounter, there is a negative one to offset it. “Sometimes what looks like shelter is only menace,” writes Caffall.
Caffall’s book shows us that we need basic human kindness to get through tough times, working together in positive ways to survive. While we can wall ourselves off from the world, we must still remember that others are people, too, not just dangerous entities. We must understand “Who benefits? And why is that so?” It is the kindness of strangers, and the trust of travellers that they will be helped, that ends the book on a positive note.
