If 2024 was my year of diving into whatever the hell I wanted, 2025 is the year I become completely unhinged about climate change in fiction. Having grown up in the late nineties and early 2000s, I thought maybe, just maybe, the governments of the world would figure this shit out. But instead, we’re being left behind, forced to adapt to a world that is spinning out of control. All The Water In The World, by Eiren Caffall, is a look at how water will change the landscape of the future, even if the story falls a little short.
Nonie can feel the water of the world. It’s been years since the glaciers have melted and flooded the world that was. Nonie lives with her family and a few of their research friends in the near-abandoned New York City, stewards of the collections in the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH). When a hypercane bears down on the island, breaking down the floodgates, the few remaining survivors take to the water with a destination in mind: a farm to the north. Along the way, the small group encounters various conclaves of survivors, some welcoming and others more hostile. Can Nonie and those she travels with find some way to adapt to continue the legacy they’ve tried to save?
All The Water In The World is a contemplative book. Though it does not want for thrilling intensity at times, its pages are more devoted to imagining the world as it will be. The story is told in a series of journal-like entries by the central character Nonie as her family is forced to leave the seeming sanctuary of AMNH, and head north to a fabled farm in western Massachusetts. There are flashbacks mixed in with the present events as they unfold in front of Nonie. Caffall’s prose sets a clear tone throughout the story, and it’s a tone I appreciated immensely the longer I sat with the story, and that’s one of acceptance. Acceptance that the world as it was, one of intensely developed urban landscapes, is facing the curtain call. Acceptance that the world as it is, flooded, depopulated and intensely warmer is a place of transition. And finally acceptance that the world that is to come, has yet to be truly imagined and may never really meet our expectations.
Nonie’s reflections on these time periods and ways of living don’t really carry any anger or regret about the world as it was. She doesn’t blame anyone for having to live in a depopulated world one storm away from total upheaval. She is a child of the world as it is, she knows nothing else. She’s barely a teenager within the story, able to adapt to the horrors in front of her because she has no other choice. Live with what comes, survive the dangers lurking around the corners, and do what it takes to learn and survive. This becomes especially apparent in her relationship with water. While her deep sense of water doesn’t really contribute to a major part of the story, it allows her to explain to the reader the various dangers that water carries with it. Yes, it is essential to life, but it can easily take it away. Nonie goes into great detail about the things one has to pay attention to now that floods and city-destroying storms are the norm. Having followed news about climate change since I was very young, I understood the power of flooding. While All The Water does paint that power well, it also spends time with a lot of little ways our relationship with water will change.
Think about how dirty water will be as it wipes away the evidence of our civilizations. How the dwindling of medical supplies, produced in the sterile environments secured by complex society, means a simple cut submerged in that water could lead to a staph infection. Gunshot wounds would be hard to plug with wet material from unclean water. Journeys that exceed more than a day would need supplies of clean drinking water that are not easily replenished. Travel would be conducted primarily by boat, but you need ways of protecting your crafts. These ideas are nothing new but merely things that our complex societies have allowed the majority of people to not have to think about, especially in the urban cores of developed nations. Yes, people do not have access to those things now (more due to structural reasons of exclusion and class separations), but they will be totally absent in the ways that we understand them in the future. All of these things are pointed out in a matter-of-fact tone employed by Nonie. It allows for the reader to really think out the implications the narrative is hinting at. The slow burn gives the space for that contemplation without rushing the reader from set piece to set piece.
Something I mentioned in my Mechanize My Hands To War review, is its focus on childrens’ place in the future. If I had one main criticism of All The Water In The World, it revolves around the place of children in the story. Caffall rightly places them front and center, with Nonie as the narrator and detailing her relationship with her sister Bix. And it aids the themes of the story, forcing the reader to experience the world as it is without the baggage of remembering it as it was. It gives the book a clean break between worlds, with a few messy strands that remind us the break is an illusion. And this is going to sound like I want to have my cake and eat it too, but I also feel this simplifies things a little too much. Because we see the world outside New York and AMNH through a child’s eyes, the complexities of the flooded world feel absent. Good or bad is assigned with a sort of incurious negligence. Adults do try to explain to Nonie that things are tough to assign “good” or “bad,” but it’s her journal and those classifications happen anyway. It’s not bad that this happens, it just clashes with the exhaustive ways in which this new reality is portrayed on a natural level. The human condition and the relations that create it are oversimplified.
The story is also a little wonky overall. I enjoyed it, but not a lot really happens when you look at it in the broad view. It’s mostly a journey in which bad things happen to people trying to survive. And it works from that perspective, but unlike other similar stories, the characters don’t linger enough in the spaces where new ways of living are being explored to really explore them. Times are changing too fast, and disaster is always dogging the heels of the main characters. I think it would have been interesting if that felt like part of the point, that new societies that have not totally learned to adapt are bound to be washed away, but it didn’t really carry that weight. I think this is more just a part of the issue of having a child narrator who doesn’t really have the ability to think about things in that way. I wish there had been a little more exploration of this because so many of the conversations revolve around what we should save, what we can save, and what needs to be learned or relearned in order to survive. It just feels a little thin compared to other post-apocalyptic journeys I’ve read or engaged with.
All The Water In World isn’t a book I would rush for. It has a lot of neat stuff about water, the natural world, and the animals that populate it. It points out so much of what has been lost in our severance from the lessons our world can teach us. But if you’re looking for an intimate review of the ways people might adapt to such surroundings, this book doesn’t dive deep enough for my tastes. So, if you’re feeling blue and want to reconnect with the pulsing of the waves and the fickle nature of storms, wade into All The Water In The World.
Rating: All The Water In The World – Worth a read, but not the rush.
-Alex
