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Loading... The Dark Flood Rises (2016)by Margaret Drabble
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. MD takes on aging and death - dense and fascinating. I began this audiobook today and am instantly enamored. Dame(!) Margaret Drabble is still a wonderful writer--and I knew her when... She has always written about women of her age and I read many of her early novels. I haven't read anything by her in the last 20-30 years, but this novel begins with wit and insight. Everything you ever wanted to know about getting old. I would recommend it to anyone, but especially to those of us embarking on old age. A terrible novel that intrigued me even so. There are brilliant flashes of insight throughout, which burst into my thoughts as beautiful truths--in the same way that great poetry says those things that you have always known to be true, and recognize, in the instant of reading the words (but not before), that you have always known it to be true. That should be enough for any book to be great. I almost wish though that I could take these fragments out of the greater whole of the novel, which was terribly flawed as novels go. For instance: All the characters think nearly the same thoughts, and in the same cadence of sentences. And: There is a great deal--a ponderousness, even--of back story, on nearly every page. There are too many characters to care about. And this: Everyone is a little bit mean, in almost exactly the same way. So I'm settling in on a "it was okay" feeling which makes me feel guilty because I feel even so I've spent several hours in the company of an amazing person, with an amazing mind--one that just now is turned toward the task of revealing, to us readers, all the ridiculous, sentimental, hard, terrifying truths about mortality.
This masterly novel by the great English author Margaret Drabble is beautifully served by Anna Bentinck's low-key and sensitive performance, which permits the book's language and meaning to shine. AwardsDistinctions
"A magnificently mordant reckoning with mortality by the great British novelist Francesca Stubbs has a very full life. A highly regarded expert on housing for the elderly who is herself getting on in age, she drives restlessly round England, which is 'her last love'. She wants to 'see it all before she dies'. Amid the professional conferences she attends, she fits in visits to old friends, brings home-cooked dinners to her ex-husband, texts her son, who is grieving over the sudden death of his girlfriend, and drops in on her daughter, a quirky young woman who lives in a floodplain in the West Country. The space between vitality and morality suddenly seems narrow, but Fran is not ready to settle yet, with a 'cat upon her knee'. She still prizes her 'frisson of autonomy', her belief in herself as a dynamic individual doing meaningful work in the world. This dark and glittering novel moves back and forth between an interconnected group of family and friends in England and a seemingly idyllic expat community in the Canary Islands. It is set against a backdrop of rising flood tides in Britain and the seismic fragility of the Canaries, where we also observe the flow of immigrants from an increasingly war-torn Middle East. With Margaret Drabble's characteristic wit and deceptively simple prose, The Dark Flood Rises enthralls, entertains, and asks existential questions in equal measure. Of course, there is undeniable truth in Francesca's insight: 'Old age, it's a fucking disaster!'"-- No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)823.914Literature English English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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