Slow River
by Nicola Griffith
Summary
Lore van Oesterling wakes naked in an alley in a northern English city with the wounds from a bad kidnapping and no identity she is prepared to use. Her family is one of the richest on earth, having built the water treatment technology that most of the world depends on, and they refused to pay her ransom.
She is picked up by Spanner, who is charming, criminal and very good at forging identities, and who supports them both through fraud, blackmail and pornography, some of it made using Lore. It is not a rescue. It is another kind of captivity, and the fact that Lore chooses it repeatedly is the honest thing about the book.
Eventually she takes a job on a forged identity at a municipal water treatment plant, doing shift work in sludge management with people who have no idea who she is, and finds that the work is real, that she is good at it, and that the plant is quietly falsifying its bioremediation figures.
Griffith interleaves three timelines: the childhood in the family compound, the years with Spanner, and the present at the plant, and the reader assembles what actually happened in that family well before Lore is willing to say it.
Spanner is the achievement. Griffith refuses to make her simply an abuser or simply a rescuer, and Lore's inability to decide which she was is the honest centre of the novel.
Around three hundred and forty pages, cold, exact and unusually good on the texture of industrial shift work, with the three timelines cut fine enough that the reader assembles the family before Lore will say it.
Contains child sexual abuse and coerced pornography, handled directly rather than luridly. Best for readers who want a life rebuilt from the bottom, with a sewage plant as the most hopeful setting in the book.
Historical Context & Significance
Slow River won the 1996 Nebula Award for Best Novel and the Lambda Literary Award.
Nicola Griffith is English, moved to the United States, and had won the Tiptree and Lambda awards for her first novel Ammonite. She has multiple sclerosis, has written extensively about disability in fiction, and later moved into historical fiction with Hild, a novel about the seventh century abbess of Whitby.
The bioremediation is researched rather than invented. Griffith worked through the chemistry and process engineering of municipal water treatment, and the novel's insistence that the least glamorous infrastructure is what a civilisation actually rests on was unusual for science fiction in 1995 and has aged extremely well.
It is also, quietly, a landmark for its central lesbian relationships being neither the subject of the book nor a source of conflict in it, which was still uncommon in genre fiction of the period and is part of why the Lambda came with the Nebula.