Private Rites by Julia Armfield — a dystopian world where it always rains

Dystopias in fiction are two-a-penny these days, so if you’re going to give your novel a hellish setting, you’d better make it a memorable one. Julia Armfield does so in her second novel Private Rites. Others in our climate-struck era might create a world where water is scarce, such as Cynan Jones’s Stillicide, but here we get a world where it’s always raining — which certainly makes for a very British apocalypse.

In a world where flood waters are rising and “the gaps between rain are so few and far between that they barely count as gaps so much as temporary glitches”, three sisters are “trying to be less conclusively the product of their past”. Their father, a celebrated architect named Stephen Carmichael, has died, and when the force of a big personality breaks, it unleashes chaos on those left behind. They are psychotherapist Isla, admin worker Irene — both in their 30s — and their decade-younger half-sister Agnes, a barista. All three are gay, and in different relationship stages: Agnes starting out with Stephanie, Irene going steady with non-binary Jude, and Isla recently split from wife Morven.

Their father Stephen is an absence in the book just as he is in the sisters’ lives, portrayed only by reputation: a man “spiteful in ways journalists excused as caustic wit”. Some of his work involved designing buildings to cope with rising water levels, “life-preserving structures, built for people who could afford them”. He was, say his admirers, “the hero of the domestic space”, a comment heavy with irony given the mystery around his wives. His first, Isla and Irene’s mother, died in a thematically apt way, and his second, Agnes’s mother, disappeared.

Private Rites has elements in common with Armfield’s earlier books: water featured as an elemental force in both her story collection Salt Slow (2019) and her debut novel Our Wives Under the Sea (2022). Like those books, this one is set in a world at once beset with strangeness but also recognisably our own. (People still write names on coffee cups and quote This is Spinal Tap.) These give the book a strong flavour, as a background setting for the sisters’ struggles with themselves and one another. The watery setting also recalls modern dystopias such as Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From and Sophie Mackintosh’s The Water Cure.

Like Mackintosh’s novel, the story is loosely inspired by King Lear — “King Lear and his dyke daughters”, Irene observes, spelling out the connection — and it’s the fallout from their father’s disposal of his house and money that fuels the novel’s central plot. “Do you think that the problem was Dad, or did we just use it as an excuse for everything?” Irene asks. But plot doesn’t seem to be Armfield’s main interest: she’s keener on internal monologue and memories, at least until the end, when the drama picks up in a way that is inevitable but nonetheless satisfying. 

A bit more of that narrative drive would have been welcome earlier in the book, where the story shifts between the sisters but their voices are never distinct, and it’s some way into the story before their individual characters become clear. (Even then the only one who stands out is Irene, a woman who could start a fight in an empty room.) 

Style isn’t everything, but in a month when I read new novels by Kevin Barry, Rachel Cusk, Miranda July and Colm Tóibín, the flatness of Armfield’s prose is all the more obvious. Nonetheless she remains a writer worth reading: there’s a physicality here that recalls Sarah Hall and Daisy Johnson, even if the effects can be scattershot. (One indelible line likens God to “being fisted by the person you love most in the world”.)

And the ideas in Private Rites are intriguing and provocative. Ever-rising flood water — nobody is quite sure, but the rains seem to keep getting worse — means everyone assumes that time is short, and the end is nigh. Morven left Isla because she wanted “to live while the world is still liveable”; Agnes wonders why, in these circumstances, Stephanie is “doing a job you don’t like”.

In this way the characters, like those in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, represent foreshortened, intensified versions of our own lives. Asking “How should I live?” when the end of the world is imminent reminds us that it is a question we all must face, sooner or later. Perhaps we should listen to one of the messages that Isla and Irene’s mother left them before her death: “Dearest girls,” she wrote, “things will begin to make good sense in time”. In Armfield’s uncompromising world, that’s the best we can hope for.

Private Rites by Julia Armfield Fourth Estate £16.99/Flatiron $27.99, 336 pages

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