BEST BOOKS ON... FLOODS
SO FAR, this bleak midwinter general election campaign has offered few compelling moments. One was when the PM, visiting flooded South Yorkshire communities, came face-toface with furious residents. ‘What are you going to do about it, Boris?’ demanded one woman.
The PM may feel he has been on firmer ground since, but many of those residents have only just been allowed home to sift through the wreckage of their ransacked lives and assess what is salvageable.
Flooding is devastating and disconcerting. In the Bible, it is a punishment; a judgment from God. That rhetoric still resonates: for climate-change Jeremiahs, flooding is a warning of the hardships to come, nature’s judgment of our selfishness. I would take heed.
John Lanchester’s dystopian The Wall is set in a fortress Britain. Rising sea levels, receding land and mass movements of migrants disgorged from their own countries, has led to giant battlements being erected all around our coastline. Every young person must undertake a national service tour of duty of the Wall. This is one young man’s account of his.
Jojo Moyes’ recent bestseller, The Giver Of Stars, is set in the boondocks of Depression-era Kentucky. Its hardy, horse-riding heroines are inspired by the mobile librarians of the Pack Horse Library initiative, a New-Deal funded scheme that in the 1930s and 1940s ensured books reached poor and remote communities. In the novel, Moyes’ librarians act together to help households stranded by rising water. For the women, it is a defining moment in their friendship and lives. But when the water recedes, it leaves behind at least one nasty surprise.
In George Eliot’s classic, The Mill On The Floss, the lives of the Tulliver family are shaped by their relationship to the river that flows through their land. It provides the Tullivers’ income, and entertainment for the young Maggie and Tom.
Ultimately, however, those waters are an even more unchecked force of nature than the headstrong Maggie. It is a flood that precipitates the novel’s tragic end. Never underestimate the power of nature.