Dry

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Saskatoon’s Barbara Sapergia has demonstrated her creativity in short
stories, novels, and drama. Her work has been presented on radio,
television, and the stage. Dry (shortlisted for the Saskatchewan Book
Awards) is set on the drought-ravaged Saskatchewan prairies in 2023. The
entire region has been reduced to an infertile landscape. Communities
are scattered around, surviving by gathering whatever water they can,
piecing together their habitations with chunks of discarded metal.
Wrekker colonies live in the remains of cars from earlier generations.
Moose Jaw remains largely as a tourist destination, but other cities
have been destroyed and abandoned. The novel’s protagonists, Signy
Nilsson, her brother, Tomas, and Signy’s 12-year-old son, David, live
on their section, Sunterra Farm, where Signy and Tomas are experimenting
with varieties of wheatgrass, attempting to reverse the destruction
caused by the drought. Next door to their land is the estate of Magnus
Dragland, one of the world’s richest men and the owner of a network of
companies engaged in genetic modification and herbicide techniques that
have killed off much of the vegetation that remained following the
climatic devastation. Signy makes her rounds on a skyboat, sailing about
the parched ground to gather the soil and wheatgrass samples necessary
for her work.

The story is told in the present tense. Sapergia introduces many of her
scenes with what are basically stage directions: “Signy enters
David’s room ...” she writes, “both bedroom and classroom. He’s
supposed to be doing his homework but he must have slipped out for a
moment. The room has a loft bed, a desk with a computer in the middle,
and on the wall, shelves holding his treasures.” The technique creates
a sense of immediacy.

Dry has been called a “prairie novel” by most of its critics, but
in Sapergia’s skilled hands the genre has been extended into an
imaginative future.