BookBrowse Reviews The Dark Flood Rises by Margaret Drabble

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A vital and audacious tale about the many ways in which we confront aging and living in a time of geopolitical rupture.

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Margaret Drabble, the award-winning novelist and literary critic who is approaching eighty and showing no signs of slowing down, turns her attention to the passage of time and the recognition of human mortality in her latest novel. At its center is Francesca Stubbs, who has made it her life's work to make aging less onerous, indeed less dangerous, traveling around England inspecting and evaluating retirement homes and nursing facilities. Her work is, perhaps, less glamorous or cutting-edge than that of her younger colleagues, who evaluate innovations such as robots to help the elderly, but she knows that dignity and respect, as well as simple solutions, can often do more to ease a burden than any technological breakthrough ever could.

Francesca's story, which shows the energetic older woman engaging in her professional activities and also preoccupying herself with the concerns of her various family members and friends (some of whom are, themselves, in that aging population she has so long served), is interspersed with glimpses into these friends', family members', and acquaintances' own lives and interests. These include Francesca's son Christopher, who has returned to the Canary Islands, where his girlfriend became suddenly ill and died while shooting a documentary film about the refugee crisis, as well as Francesca's ex-husband, Claude, who is quite infirm and contents himself with his affection for his home health nurse as well as the meals Francesca makes and freezes for him. Francesca's daughter, Poppet, lives an isolated life in England's West Country, fixated on various environmental causes. And her old friends Josephine and Teresa, whose friendships date back decades, are dealing with aging in their own very different ways.

Along the way, Drabble interjects her sizeable critical expertise, offering up the ways in which authors such as Samuel Beckett and William Butler Yeats have addressed the questions of aging, mortality, and the end of life. She also offers readers a broad medley of different approaches to aging, from rage to defeat to renewed vitality. Francesca herself offers one model that is both sensible and compassionate: "Her inspections… have made her aware of the infinitely clever and complex and inhumane delays and devices we create to avoid and deny death, to avoid fulfilling our destiny and arriving at our destination. And the result, in so many cases, has been that we arrive there not in good spirits, as we say our last farewells and greet the afterlife, but senseless, incontinent, demented, medicated into amnesia, aphasia, indignity."

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.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in March 2017, and has been updated for the February 2018 edition. Click here to go to this issue.