In Julia Armfield’s second novel Private Rites, three sisters are brought back into each other’s orbit by the death of their father, a renowned architect of climate change proof homes for the wealthy. Against the backdrop of a rapidly breaking down society in a world that is drowning with the impending doom of an oncoming waterpocalypse, we see Isla, Irene and Agnes contend with each other, with their shared past, and also with something strange that seems to be happening around them—something they can not quite grasp, unbidden memories they cannot quite place, and childhood traumas that haven’t been resolved or even fully understood.
And in the background, there is the endless rain, the rising seas, the urban flooding that is causing entire houses to wash away, buildings to cascade down slopes, people to vanish into the sea. The climate crisis vibrates in the background constantly, like a low decibel thrum seeping into your bones, like damp, like mould.
As adults, the sisters are not in touch with each other, until they get a call that their ailing father has died. They come together to deal with his death, and to deal with their own grief, which is, as always, a complicated and strange emotion that brings with it so many other feelings. Isla is a distracted and tense about-to-be divorced psychiatrist. Irene’s partner loves her and supports her, but Irene hasn’t been able to find any sort of deeper purpose to her own life since she gave up on her PhD. Their much younger sister, Agnes, drifts between random sexual encounters while doing shifts at a coffee shop, unable to develop any long term intimacies with anyone.
Each of the women have hazy memories of their mothers (Isla and Irene from the first of their father’s wives, Agnes from a short-lived second marriage), but they do share strong, often traumatic memories of their father, the formidable and (in)famous Stephen Carmichael, an avant-garde architect known for creating structures that would withstand the devastating effects of climate change: fancy homes to withstand the apocalypse, built for the rich to survive in splendour. “He was responsible for great portions of the city as it stands today, the upward heave of a population trying to scramble out of water,” we are told, “his structures allowed their inhabitants to ignore their surroundings, turn inward and forget, though for a price very few could afford.”
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Private Rites
Isla and Irene’s mother was a deeply troubled woman, from what the sisters recall: “She had been increasingly subject to night sweats and frenetic impulse, long periods of agitation that found her outside at odd times and in uncertain weather; […] she had paid people to rake their hands across her skill, to realign her aura, to hold her down and slap her back and forth across the face,” but nothing had helped her. Agnes’ mother, meanwhile, is a mystery to all three of the sisters, even to the older two who remember her better. She vanished when Agnes was very young, leaving the older two girls to care for a toddler under the supervision of their cold, foreboding father, in a cold, foreboding house that was built to withstand the effects of climate change and rising sea levels, not to be a family home. The sisters had no example of what healthy, loving relationships looked like: Their father was cruel and calculating, often pitting his daughters against each other, creating contention and jealousy where they may not have been any without his intervention:
[…] their father, giving pocket money only to Irene and telling her not to tell Isla. Their father, confiscating all of Isla’s books for using his computer and giving them to the others. Their father, making a four year old Agnes stand out in the corridor when she screamed, refusing to let anyone go to her as she howled into insensibility and finally wet herself.
Even after his death, the sisters fall into set patterns when they meet, even if they don’t want to, even if they have grown as people, grown apart as adults. One word, one misstep and they are all back in the roles they were in as children, when they were motherless daughters trying to raise each other, with the same fraught dynamics, the same rhythms and beats: “Sisterhood,” thinks Irene, “is a trap, you all get stuck in certain roles forever… the sensation, then, not so much of being misunderstood as of being understood too well at one time and then never again.”
Private Rites has been touted as a modern, queer take on King Lear, which is mentioned in the book by Irene, when she describes her family as “King Lear and his dyke daughters.” The novel carries the pervasive, heavy feelings of a Shakespearean tragedy. King Lear, the play, also explored climate and the environment thematically: Storms, winds, and the weather were part of the dramatis personae, just as they are in Armfield’s book, which is told from the third person perspective of each of the sisters, and also that of the City, as it reflects the growing turmoil of the family.
Armfield’s distinct poetic fascination with the sea and all things submerged was also the primary colour of Our Wives Under the Sea. In Private Rites, the sea starts to take over as the city submerges, and as things that should remain in the depths are brought up to the surface—both literally and metaphorically. Armfield writes, “people throw themselves into deepening water, people disappear… Strange things blown in on inner-city waters; a man who calls a radio station reporting what he claims to be the body of a seal thrown up against his door. People reach into their gutters to unstick the scuttled shards of razor clans and strange crustaceans… Wide waters, sloe-black and dense with detritus: glass beads and tin cans and bodies of cormorants, sugar packets and plastic spoons and shopping trolleys and the heads and tails of creatures blown off course and drowned for want of salt.” And, in the personal lives of the sisters, their shared buried past rises like emotional effluvium.
Use of pathetic fallacy notwithstanding, the near future Armfield has set her story in is, of course, very close to our current reality where parts of the world are already drowning, with climate change affecting everything from crops to graveyards to transport to basic infrastructure, even in the more developed areas of the world. Armfield simply takes what we are already experiencing, and pushes it to a frightening likelihood. People are living “however they can, bunched together in tower blocks ill-equipped for modern circumstances, renting well over the odds, losing power, existing. It has been so many years—a decade of this, another decade before that of almost this. … It rains constantly and the fact of the rain, of the rain’s whole great impending somethingness, runs parallel to the day-to-day of work and sleep and lottery tickets, of yoga challenges, of buying fruit and paying taxes, of mopping floors and taking drugs on weekends and reading books and wonder what to do on dates. It’s exhausting, as it always was, to live with such a breadth of things to take up ones’ attention—exhausting, the way there can be too much world, even in its final stages. Exhausting, to be so busy and so bored with no time left for either.”
This exhaustion is the overbearing feeling for each of the sisters too, as they try to navigate not just the rapidly deteriorating environment, but also the fallout of their father’s will, and the revelation of secrets from their past. While the story is very character-driven, there are other ominous machinations at play that are hinted at throughout the novel and come together seismically at the very end of the novel, a cascade effect of tiny breadcrumbs leading to a veritable horror scene in a number of ways. Earlier in the novel, we are told that “at pinch points, people always turn to the division, or if not to the divine then at least to the well trodden. It’s a backup… like a tested recipe. People love a ritual when things get hairy, to feel they’re doing something that thousands of people have done before them.”
In a story about the end of the world as we’ve known it, there are losses to be witnessed on a macro level with massive infrastructural collapse. Capitalism looms large, but it is clear that human society has already started to change into something else. But some things remain, because the smaller, individual losses at a personal level, the grief and love and resentment that is just so intrinsic to human nature does not change and is still important, is still valid, is still worth writing about. No matter how the world drowns, Armfield shows us, the love we feel is what anchors us together, and that perhaps is the only thing that truly matters.
Private Rites is published by Flatiron Books.
