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Toxic Horizons

Updated: Feb 23, 2021

In a world where toxic masculinity can kill you, your only way of survival is to isolate on an island.


This is the world in which The Water Cure (2018) is set. Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018, Sophie Mackintosh creates a psychological whirlwind. Grace, Lia and Sky are sisters who live on an island with their mother and father in order to protect themselves from the dangers of the mainland.


Women seem allergic to men but this is never outrightly said as everything is assumed but never certain. The dystopian novel is set in an unspecified time and place, but it centres itself on real threats to women that has dominated history, such as the mistreatment of women’s bodies under patriarchy.


The sisters regularly take the therapies too as their parents teach them to focus on survival.

Everything else that could jeopardise this is pushed away as they are taught that:

‘it is important to ignore any contrary instinct of your traitor heart.’ (10)

Emotions are described as ‘limping, wretched things’ (12) to be contained.


However, the therapies are acts of torture, including near drowning, (the ‘water cure’) killing animals, deliberate fainting and being stitched into sacks. It becomes more and more clear as we get further into the sisters’ trauma that the parental love the daughters know is incredibly toxic. The sisters’ are warned about the dangers of a patriarchal society, yet family life as they know it is an extreme example of a patriarchal family structure. Their father is referred to as ‘King’ and the sisters are mentally and physically manipulated so that their parents keep in control.


It begs the question what the true threat is: the seeming toxicity of the mainland, or the family structure that the sisters’ know of. In an interview with Deirdre Coyle for Electric Lit, Mackintosh empathises the importance of creating suspense:

‘I am very much a believer in the power of ambiguity, how vagueness and insinuation, the things that edge around what is unknown, can be the most terrifying of all.’

( ‘In The Water Cure, Toxic Masculinity is Making Women Physically Ill,’ January 9 2019.)



Mackintosh certainly achieves this as she leaves it up to the reader to decide whether the sisters are refugees from a poisoned world, or are victims of a tiny family-led cult. Wherever the truth lies, it is a terrifying and suspenseful read.


Rating: ****



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