It’s rare that I don’t finish even a terrible book, but this was just too pointless and too British — I forged ahead through the first 1/3 based on its placement on the NYT Notable Books of 2017 list, but just couldn’t keep going. When I say “too pointless,” what I mean is that it’s a detailed account of the lives of multiple elderly people without much plot to tie it together. When I say “too British,” I mean it’s rife with discussions about British government-supported options, like a “PPD” and details of the nationalized health care system, which are never explained (and even if they were, would probably be boring to read about).
Review of 'The Dark Flood Rises' on 'LibraryThing'
No rating
I once had read every novel Margaret Drabble wrote. In fact, I was planning to write my master's thesis on her work but was persuaded not to. I haven't read the last six or so of her novels, but found the theme of this one interesting. Old age and the approach of death isn't typical fare for fiction. Here, we meet friends and family members in England and living the expat life in the Canary Islands, bound together by filaments of connection. An aging academic and his younger devoted but tied down companion, a woman who keeps almost frantically busy driving around the country writing reports on care homes, her contented and hedonistic ex who doesn't seem to mind being disabled so long as women take care of him, a child whose partner has died suddenly in youth. Another offspring is, like an adult child in The Realms of Gold, …
I once had read every novel Margaret Drabble wrote. In fact, I was planning to write my master's thesis on her work but was persuaded not to. I haven't read the last six or so of her novels, but found the theme of this one interesting. Old age and the approach of death isn't typical fare for fiction. Here, we meet friends and family members in England and living the expat life in the Canary Islands, bound together by filaments of connection. An aging academic and his younger devoted but tied down companion, a woman who keeps almost frantically busy driving around the country writing reports on care homes, her contented and hedonistic ex who doesn't seem to mind being disabled so long as women take care of him, a child whose partner has died suddenly in youth. Another offspring is, like an adult child in The Realms of Gold, devoted to charting the coming environmental catastophe, and the landscape and mood reflects that in the landscape and the news heard off stage. Joined to that disaster approaching from the periphery is a cleft in the floor of the ocean, threatening to create a tsunami. All of the characters are thinking about the end approaching them, or doing what they can to avoid thinking about it. This sounds dreary, but I found their lives and the underlying mood of things coming to their natural end very engaging. returnreturnI was surprised how familiar it felt. Her style remains fluid, chatty, liable to slide among characters and perspectives easily and intimately, with occasional asides from the author (who, at one point, says it's none of our business what one of the characters is thinking about a particular topic). They are all English and well-educated and white and not likely to bother translating the occasional French bon mot and so they are in a way a vanishing generation of privilege, and that was a bit startling. Drabble has always been aware of class and gender, and of North and southern England, not so much racial or ethnic diversity. She is, in many ways, an olf-fashioned novelist and her ending wraps things up the way many 19th century novels do. Perhaps that's particularly appropriate for a book about endings.
