A heartbreaking and hilarious look at the modern way of death
MARGARET Drabble’s latest novel is set firmly in the here-and-now, a dreary, smeary Britain of Premier Inns and traffic jams. In tone and cadence, though, it’s pure mid-20th century. From the opening scene, in which we encounter Fran “driving along the M1 towards Birmingham, at only three or four miles above the speed limit” while mulling over social housing, the NHS and land tax, it is as if we have wandered unwittingly into the pages of a Hampstead novel.
The female characters are able, even eager, to think of themselves as separate from their children, the shock of which is muted these days, but still felt; and all the characters, educated and middle-class, subject themselves to ruthless self-scrutiny and come to unsentimental conclusions.
To find ourselves once again in this atmosphere, first encountered in novels such as Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head , is an odd sensation, wrong-footing at first. But The Dark Flood Rises soon makes perfect sense — not as an anachronism, but as an ensemble piece about the Hampstead novel generation, finally grown old.
Mellowed or calcified, according to their nature, some are dying, others are already dead. Through the independent and industrious Fran, who zips around the country to speak at conferences about sheltered accommodation in between batch-cooking for her house-bound ex-husband, we gain entry to the lives of her cohort.
Claude, her ex-husband, a doctor, is expiring comfortably in his Kensington mansion flat. Her childhood friend Teresa, a sometime authority in the field of special-needs education, is dying of a rare cancer. Josephine, whose children played with Fran’s, lives in an ersatz Cambridge college for retired academics and is writing a paper on Victorian literature. Their experiences of old age are as varied as their experiences of every other stage in their now officially long lives have been, but they are united in their attitudes and sensibilities.
They are united, too, in their obsession with death, the “dark flood” of the title. They are all at the tideline, clinging to the rocks as one by one they are plucked off and dragged under. Not all of those we meet at the beginning of the book make it to the end, and Drabble trips us up into joining in the characters’ ghoulish speculation over who’ll go first.
In The Dark Flood Rises the characters ponder death a great deal – their own and others’. It doesn’t seem to distress them. They subject it to the un-indulgent scrutiny that they had turned upon marriage and children. On learning that one of her closest friends has had a fatal heart attack, Fran “tells herself that she had died the perfect death, but that puts the burden of living squarely back on her. She’s got to keep going. There’s nothing else to do. You keep going until you can’t go any further. And you can’t count on the perfect death, at the end of the run.”
This is not a showy book. There are no dramatic revelations or even, despite the body count, moments of crisis.
It’s only as the novel unfolds that we see what Drabble has pulled off: a quietly revolutionary portrait of an age-group whose lives are just as vivid and urgent as anyone’s, but whose experience is rarely considered collectively, or at all.
After her second husband dies, Fran unconventionally forsakes her comfortable marital home in favour of a high-rise in a grottier part of London.
“Fran is fond of her flat in Tarrant Towers,” we hear, “although it is a bad address, a bad postcode, and the lifts often break down. But the view is glorious, the great view over London… She endures the lowering blanketed greys of winter, the monotonous dull skies of February, and waits for the opening drama of the spring. Elevate, sublimate, transcend, that’s what the view tells Fran. And climbing up the concrete stairwell once or twice a week is good for the heart.”
‘This is not a showy book. There are no dramatic revelations’