Fire and Rain
Like fire, air and earth, water is a sacred image common to many religions. These elements also figure prominently in mythology and in great literature. Water is a sign of retribution and renewal… of God’s favor (“And the Sprit of the Lord moved upon the face of the waters”) and fury (“And behold I… do bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh…”). It cleanses and corrupts. It sanctifies (baptism) and soils (the Flood. Compare the version in the Gilgamesh epic which describes the gods descending upon the sacrifice like flies after the waters recede. The aftermath of Katrina is a contemporary example). Water is much more than an image in Sarah Hall’s 2006 novel Haweswater. It is an essential element.
Hawewater tells the story of a small group of villagers in the Lake Country of Northwest England who are displaced by the construction of a dam in their valley. For the good people of Mardale, water brings an end to the only existence they or their forbearers have ever known: tending sheep and horses and sustenance farming. For the members of the Lightburn family it will mean this and more: untold grief and tragedy.
Ella and Sam Lightburn met when Ella was a nurse at a veteran's hospital where Sam was recovering after being wounded in action in WWII. Her aunt had a piece of property in Mardale and the couple returned there after the war. Once there they fell into the familiar rhythms of agrarian life, governed by the tempo of the seasons and the staccato bursts of wild, Cumbrian weather. Their lives were part of a pattern that had been impressed on the region since feudal times: God-fearing, independent, taciturn people who didn’t have much but were happy with what they have. In a way, the birth of their two children, Janet and Isaac, portended the disruption of that pattern before plans for a dam were ever revealed.
Ella Lightburn struggled with both deliveries and her curses and oaths filled the night. She was duly penitent afterwards but the circumstances of the births seemed to suggest that she had borne something not-quite human, even preternatural, proof against bloodshed, death, and the harsh climate that are part of their rural lives. They were more of the elements, especially water, than of the earth, like creatures from Faerie. Isaac would hold his face down in freezing cold currents to study the life trapped underwater. Janet worked fearlessly by her father’s side, seemingly impervious to pain or her personal safety. Once, when she and her father are cornered by an escaped bull, she climbed a nearby tree to safety then hurled herself down on the bull when her father is unable to contain it. Later when Jack Liggett, a representative from Manchester Power who has been sent to negotiate settlements with the local residents on their property to make room for the dam, and Janet find themselves trapped together in a rainstorm, she surrenders herself to him but only after she hurls her head back against the bark of the tree under which they are sheltering. “Her scalp is cut on the sharp wood, as if she is demented, trapped in an asylum with walls of precipitation.”
Janet and Isaac are wild and exotic creatures, like the wild orchids Janet takes Jack to see, sheltered in the lee of a waterfall at the bottom of a steep incline. Janet swims naked in the freezing water of the pool at the bottom of the waterfall and Jack watches from the edge. “As he inched along, he wondered at the contents of the pool, strange prehistoric fish with fat lower jaws, jagged spines and the inevitable decaying carcass of a sheep.” When she emerges from this primal soup, she stands naked before him, still “except for the water running from her body. She looked like a statue of rain.” It is an erotically charged scene and this, along with the raw physicality that characterizes their relationship, seems to represent the collision of two worlds: the timeless tradition of the valley being destroyed by the incursion of the modern world like a lightening bolt cleaving a fallen tree trunk.
Even though Janet succeeds in seducing Jack with the rural charms of the Lake Country, its demise is a foregone conclusion. As are the deaths of the characters who find themselves clinging to the old ways: Janet, Isaac, and, once he has been converted by Janet, Jack himself. The characters do not so much inhabit this landscape, as they haunt it. Indeed, in an after word, the author, who actually grew up in Cumbria and became intrigued with the story of the town that lies beneath the lake, suggests that Janet is based on a figure in local legend.
“She has become a character in the novel, a real girl, a ghost, and a motif of the area in which she still walks. Janet, the novel’s protagonist, is full of her own land—she stewards it with her father, conducts a turbulent love affair outdoors, in secret, and enables her lover Jack to view the valley he has helped to condemn in a new light. Like the land itself, she is capable of both violence and tenderness.”
Though water is their natural element without the land, Janet and Isaac are condemned to die.
