‘Under Water’: Tara Menon’s fragmented debut on grief and climate change never quite comes together
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When the reader meets Marissa, the protagonist of Tara Menon’s Under Water, all that could happen to her has already happened. The banality of a new, if lax, life taxes her. A home awaits her – one she surely misses. She cannot fathom returning, though. It was in Thailand that a ravenous tsunami had gulped down Arielle, her once-infallible friend.
Six-year-old Arielle, upon meeting a freshly motherless Marissa, asserts that they can share hers. From then on, they share everything. They slice open a watermelon and eat it whole. Their teeth sink into fridge-cold mangoes. They bite into piping-hot pa thong ko slathered in condensed milk. They chug stolen bottles of Bacardi Breezers. For all their shared endeavours, what these two friends don’t seem to share is conversation; their banter is often laconic, even if the narration insists otherwise. No wonder, then, that Arielle, a literal apparition in half of the novel, is a literary apparition in the other. By the time she dies her inevitable death, I know her even less. To be a spirited, beautiful friend in Under Water is to be nothing more.
Such a truncated characterisation is perhaps par for the course for a novel that comes with a thesis: “So many people imagine that...