Inspiring Older Readers
The Flood by Maggie Gee
This is the first Maggie Gee novel I’ve read and it’s quite an experience – not, I confess, one without its problems. I gather that a number of the characters that appear in The Flood made their debut in earlier novels but I don’t think that is an issue because the book stands on its own without needing that backstory. Much more of a problem for me was the scope and scale of the book which I think ultimately proves too much for the author. However, it’s hard not to have admiration for the ambition and for some really sparkling passages – highlights that sadly get fewer the further into the story we get.
Written in 2004 and set at some undefined future date, Gee envisages a dystopian London that is slowly sinking beneath a rising tide of rainwater while social class distinctions determine whether you live in the low-lying Towers or have the relative comfort of the rich neighbourhoods on higher ground. An end-of-the-world cult is seizing the attention of the marginalised and Britain is embroiled in a never-ending Middle Eastern war that has remarkable similarities to Iraq. The Prime Minister, Mr Bliss, rules with a sort of matey complacency and has more than a coincidental similarity to Tony Blair.
Gee gives us a huge cast to get to grips with – families in various states of disruption and disintegration. The poor are being ground down while the rich are cavalier and spoiled. Nothing and no-one seems to lighten the rather dismal miasma that hangs over the book like the rainclouds that are constantly scudding across the sky. Even when it stops raining, there is more trouble on the way – an alignment of the planets that distracts attention from an asteroid heading towards the planet.
The dystopian lives of these inhabitants of a London ravaged by climate change are in fact about to be brought to an end, not by rain but by a huge tsunami created by the colliding asteroid.
Gee has a daring scheme for the structure of this book and one which I think is to blame for her eventually losing control of the narrative. One of her characters has written a book that he’s been working on for years that postulates the idea that all lives and experiences are lived in the synchronous moment and that there is no past or future just a multiple moment, a single now. Taking this idea, Gee tries to write in the same way – showing everyone living a simultaneous now – and the result is, sadly, chaotic and out of control.
This is not, in truth, science fiction or even really dystopian fiction – it’s a novel rooted exactly in the time in which it was written. This is 2004 and what we’re dealing with is social and political satire and commentary – it’s a perspective on British and world politics, environmental degradation and class conflict.
Taken in this light, Gee is an important contemporary novelist but on this occasion she sets herself some impossible aspirations and despite her best efforts the scope of her vision simply overwhelms her rather in the way her characters are engulfed by the rising waters.
Terry Potter
March 2018