Book review: Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson

By Simon Demetriou

Open Water is a book heavily punctuated by question marks. Over and over again, the unnamed narrator asks ‘… what is a joint? What is a fracture? What is a break?’; ‘How are you feeling? Be honest…’ Writing in the second person, as well as the recurrent use of interrogatives, has the potential to feel contrived, pretentious, or nagging. But Caleb Azumah Nelson’s brilliant debut novel feels nothing of the sort. When the narrator forces you to ask these questions, it is as part of a lyrical and moving exploration of the ‘messy miracle’ that is human (dis)connection.

The novel shines because of its writer’s artistry. His plot is an old one. Two young people; an instant connection; an impediment to be overcome; the triumph of love; the failure of love. But the novel sings. Its rhythmic sentences burst with images that manage to be both striking and profoundly truthful. There is irony here since the narrator repeatedly reflects that ‘Language fails us, always’. It is trite, but if this is language failing then there are many writers who can only dream of similar failures.

The novel explicitly treads a narrow tightrope, by foregrounding an awareness that the subject matter – young love – always risks falling into cliché: ‘You realize there is a reason clichés exist, and you would happily have your breath taken away, three seconds at a time, maybe more, by this woman.’ The magnitude of the novel’s achievement can be summed up by the fact that in its near-200 pages, it hits only one bum note, one moment where it uncritically places semantic weight on tired phrasing. You can try to find it for yourself.

It must be noted that the novel sings in a register that I am underqualified to comment on, for Open Water has widely been hailed for its invocation of black culture, the characters’ lives animated by the art of Isaiah Rashad, Kendrick Lamar, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and Barry Hawkins among others. The love story between the narrator and the woman by whom he wants to have his breath taken away is also an exploration of what it is to be young and black on the streets of London in the twenty-first century. Ultimately, the question of whether love can really overcome the traumas arising from having ‘been made a body’ by one’s race, and the prejudice and violence that surrounds the objectified body of the young black man, is left open-ended. The novel becomes a seeking for a way beyond being broken, powerfully concluding with a lesson that society and each individual ought to learn: ‘Multiple truths do exist, and you do not have to be the sum of your traumas.’