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Book Reviewed by:A magnificently mordant reckoning with mortality by the great British novelist.
Francesca Stubbs has a very full life. A highly regarded expert on housing for the elderly who is herself getting on in age, she drives "restlessly round England," which is "her last love ... She wants to see it all before she dies." Amid the professional conferences she attends, she fits in visits to old friends, brings home-cooked dinners to her ex-husband, texts her son, who is grieving over the sudden death of his girlfriend, and drops in on her daughter, a quirky young woman who lives in a floodplain in the West Country. The space between vitality and morality suddenly seems narrow, but Fran "is not ready to settle yet, with a cat upon her knee." She still prizes her "frisson of autonomy," her belief in herself as a dynamic individual doing meaningful work in the world.
This dark and glittering novel moves back and forth between an interconnected group of family and friends in England and a seemingly idyllic expat community in the Canary Islands. It is set against a backdrop of rising flood tides in Britain and the seismic fragility of the Canaries, where we also observe the flow of immigrants from an increasingly war-torn Middle East. With Margaret Drabble's characteristic wit and deceptively simple prose, The Dark Flood Rises enthralls, entertains, and asks existential questions in equal measure. Of course, there is undeniable truth in Francesca's insight: "Old age, it's a fucking disaster!"
Excerpt
The Dark Flood Rises
She has often suspected that her last words to herself and in this world will prove to be 'You bloody old fool' or, perhaps, depending on the mood of the day or the time of the night, 'you fucking idiot'. As the speeding car hits the tree, or the unserviced boiler explodes, or the smoke and flames fill the hallway, or the grip on the high guttering gives way, those will be her last words. She isn't to know for sure that it will be so, but she suspects it. In her latter years, she's become deeply interested in the phrase 'Call no man happy until he is dead.' Or no woman, come to that. 'Call no woman happy until she is dead.' Fair enough, and the ancient world had known women as well as men who had met unfortunate ends: Clytemnestra, Dido, Hecuba, Antigone. Though of course Antigone, one must remember, had rejoiced to die young, and in a good (if to us pointless) cause, thereby avoiding all the inconveniences ...
The Dark Flood Rises, in addition to offering various considerations of individual mortality, also broadens its scope to examine the aging of our civilization and our world. Drabble depicts a Europe overrun with refugees desperate for solace and safety, an island chain at risk of destruction by volcanoes, an England whose lowlands are increasingly subject to flooding. Imagery of floods, both literal and figurative, recurs throughout the narrative and gives the novel a feeling of impending doom and a sort of inevitability, an ending that is never wished for but approaches relentlessly...continued
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(Reviewed by Norah Piehl).
Floods both real (due to global warming) and figurative (tides of refugees washing ashore in the Mediterranean and elsewhere) dominate the imagery of Margaret Drabble's novel, The Dark Flood Rises. One of the most memorable discussions involves speculation about volcanic activity on the Canary Islands (where much of the novel's secondary narratives take place) and how a catastrophic volcanic event there could prove cataclysmic elsewhere, including on the other side of the Atlantic.
The Canary Islands, which are part of Spain and are located in the Atlantic Ocean west of Morocco, are a popular tourist destination, especially among Europeans. The islands are volcanic in nature, and are the only place in Spain where volcanoes have...
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