Do individual losses still matter in a world in its final stages? This is the question asked by Agnes, Isla and Irene, three queer, volatile daughters who congregate uneasily to view the corpse of their divisive, megalomaniac architect father Stephen Carmichael, while the rain pours down outside – as it has poured down for several years. Carmichael is both a contributor to this state of affairs – his gleaming masterpieces defied the early signs of climate crisis – and a saviour for the rich. His own house, which he now gifts provocatively to his youngest daughter alone, is a modernist folly-cum-masterpiece built high on ingeniously floating pylons.
This rainy city, where people live makeshift lives on the top floors of flooded tower blocks, travelling by ferry, is natural territory for Julia Armfield. She is both poet and prophet of the watery and the queer and the channels connecting them. Her vision of the sea creature in all of us – scales hidden under skin – is as seductive as the charged, casually incandescent sentences she conjures it in. She is writing in an honourable tradition: throughout literary history there are watery women destined to find and to lose themselves in the depths of the sea, whether that’s Edna drowning in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, or Ellen accepting her destiny as a mermaid in Rose Macaulay’s And No Man’s Wit. Armfield has given this trope new political urgency, first in 2022’s Our Wives Under the Sea, featuring a hushed-up submarine disaster, and now in this all-too-convincing imagining of the next phase in the climate crisis. Private Rites is so compelling partly because both the narrator and the protagonists feel intensely drawn to this watery world, even as they know it signals their end.
