N M Browne was born in Burnley, Lancashire where she lived not far from the shadow of Pendle Hill.  She worked as a teacher briefly before teaching creative writing to all age groups and abilities from children in schools to BA, MA and MFA students.  N M Browne recently completed a PhD in creative writing.  To discover more about N M Browne, visit her website here.  We are delighted to welcome N M Browne to the blog to talk about her tenth novel Bad Water.

Bad Water is my tenth novel and is very much of a piece with my other stories.

My two Carnegie nominated books: Shadow Web and Basilisk are about crossing from one world to another, about injustice and revolution set in alternate or distorted versions of our own world. My historical fiction is always set in times of change when one civilisation is under threat and a new world order threatens everything: I have written about the Roman invasion of Britain, the sixth century Saxon incursions and the ninth century tribulations of Alfred of Wessex. I like a good clash of values, ideological as well as physical conflict. I am intrigued by the complexity of political power, the significance of belief. Don’t be misled though, above all else I love a good story.

Bad Water takes place after ‘The Chaos.’ Our civilisation has largely been destroyed by climate change, disease, collapsing infrastructure and civil disobedience. What is left is the Isles of Britain, small communities clinging to islands of habitable, farmable land when most of what we know is underwater. The City of London is a crumbling network of high towers swathed in greenery from vertical farms and linked by swaying rope bridges covered in vegetation. There, the murky waters of the Thames, the Great River, are rumoured to be rife with pollution and disease. The people themselves are brutal and violent locked in an endless cycle of gang warfare. This is ‘Bad Water’ and it is best avoided.

In this world almost all the technologies which link our world are gone. ipads and phones are displayed as wealth signifiers, but very little actually works: all networks are down and the world has shrunk. Few people leave the settlement of their birth. 

Ollu, my heroine, is a barger, part of a clan who make a living trading. They recycle and repair old technology, pass messages and gossip  among the largely illiterate villages and settlements of  a drowned England. Ollu’s craft, the Ark, a matriarch boat, was built before the Chaos and has a measure of ‘preeker’ ( pre chaos) technology. Ollu can read and write and the Ark has an ancient ‘aye eye’, a computer hidden beneath its boards. Like everything else it is barely functioning, and the bargers have resorted to old messaging systems: notes written on scraps of paper,  hidden in old waterproof plastic, marked with the warning colour ‘red’ to signify danger.

When Ollu’s mother become sick after giving birth to twins, Ollu negotiates with one of their trading partners: her care in return for a terrible trade.  She has to find a cache of Preeker weapons rumoured to be stashed in Bad Water.

Like all my books, this is primarily an adventure story. Until Ollu teams up with two boys, Buzz and Ratter, she is alone as few young people today are alone. She has no peers, no friends as such. As a little child she had seen films and heard recorded music, they had a radio, but all of that is now gone . She has to make her own decisions and the stakes are high. Just as for the children of today, her present is unlike her mother’s past. What happens in the future is up to her.

The first draft of this book was written long ago when neither the reality of climate change nor the potential damage of plague was quite so prominent in the national consciousness.

My rewrites improved the plot, but never altered the world: that has always been  vivid to me. When I close my eyes I can see the rotting spires of the Old Parley ( The Palace of Westminster) emerging from the Great River, a monument to a whole history lost.

Bad Water is another story about revolution and the power of young people to change their world. Ollu’s  post Chaos drowned Britain looks broken, but to her it is a place of hope and fresh potential. She forges new trading partnerships, mends broken connections, sows the seeds of civilisation.

I didn’t write this book for a pandemic, but it is curiously apt. Post-pandemic or Post-Chaos new relationships can be forged, new connections made.

All our young people have travelled alone through Bad Water, and just as with Ollu, what happens in the future is up to them.