The Dark Flood Rises

Starred review from December 19, 2016
This searingly sad but often hilarious novel chronicles the last dance of a few old codgers, and Drabble (The Sea Lady) has filled her tale with characters desperately trying to make sense of life and loss, of beauty, talent, missed opportunities, faded passion. She burrows inside the head of Fran, a manic 70-something elder-care specialist who drives around England studying—but would never in a million years actually live in—retirement communities. She introduces us to Fran’s literary friend Josephine, with whom she shared her first few harrowing years of solitary “baby-minding,” and who now teaches adult- and continuing-ed classes, and to Claude, Fran’s ex-husband, whose career as a surgeon left Fran home alone to take care of the children. Claude is now bedridden, listening to his beloved Maria Callas while waiting for Fran to bring him plated dinners. We meet Fran’s childhood friend Teresa, dying of cancer, and Bennett, a benignly pompous Spanish Civil War expert who lives with the slightly younger Ivor in the Canaries. Fran’s two children, Christopher and Poppet, provide some relief from hammer toes, fractured hips, and terminal illness. Each character has a passion—classical music, art history, Beckett, Unamuno, and Yeats—which gives rise to Drabble’s exposition on issues that dog her. And expound she does, on “effortless, meaningless, soulless beauty,” on the philosophy of free will and coincidence (including Jung, Catholicism, and moral luck), indeed on “what on earth literature is for.”

Starred review from November 15, 2016
From veteran novelist Drabble (The Pure Gold Baby, 2013, etc.), a meditation on modern old age spiked with astringent humor on a subject "too serious for tears."Fran Stubbs, "well turned seventy," works for a charitable trust to create better housing for the elderly, but she herself lives in a shabby, poorly maintained North London apartment building for the sake of the garage and the view. She's not ready to move into expensive exurban retirement like her friend Josephine, and she's relieved not to be housebound like her terminally ill former husband, Claude. Yet Fran is wryly conscious of her fading memory and increasing scattiness as she bustles around to conferences, brings ready-to-reheat meals over to Claude (with whom she's resumed friendly relations a half-century after their divorce), and lets Josephine talk her into seeing a production of Happy Days. These typically self-aware Drabble women agree that Samuel Beckett could have spared himself all that angst about impending death when he was in his 20s and 30s: "There's time for that later, plenty of time." Mortality is much closer at hand for Bennett, an elderly historian living in the Canary Islands, and his considerably younger but now middle-aged lover, Ivor. "Who will push [my] wheelchair?" Ivor wonders, fearful that he will be alone and destitute once the man he has tended for so long dies. The link between these two storylines is Fran's hard-drinking son, Christopher, a television arts presenter who has a professional connection with Bennett, and numerous other vividly drawn characters swarm in a text notable for Drabble's customarily sharp social observations and willingness to let her plot amble where it will. The final destination of several key figures should come as no surprise, given their age, but the author evokes a palpable sense of sorrow and loss nonetheless. The lack of narrative drive may irk some readers, but those who appreciate her able combination of intelligence, wit, and rue will willingly follow Drabble into the sunset.

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September 15, 2016

The durable Drabble here portrays graying if relentlessly busy Francesca Stubbs, who rushes around England as an in-demand expert on housing for the elderly while also attending to friends, carting home-cooked dinners to her ex-husband, comforting a son mourning his girlfriend's death, and visiting her offbeat daughter in the West Country's floodplain.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 1, 2016

Francesca (Fran) Stubbs is a 70ish Londoner with a large circle of aging family and friends in various stages of decline, disease, and dementia. To the bewilderment of her children, Fran has moved into a sketchy apartment in a rundown neighborhood and continues to drive herself great distances around the English countryside to evaluate residential care homes for the elderly. When not working, Fran keeps busy visiting friends, preparing meals for them and for her bedridden ex-husband. Fran's son, Christopher, recently fired from his job as a TV culture critic, has decamped to the Canary Islands, where his girlfriend had taken ill and died suddenly while filming a documentary about undocumented African immigrants. With extreme winter weather threatening floods in England and earthquakes in the Canary Islands, the darkness closes in on Fran and her associates. VERDICT For women of a certain age, it is a pure pleasure to grow older alongside Drabble (The Pure Gold Baby; The Ice Age). For all others, there's plenty of joy to be had in this thoughtful meditation on aging and mortality. [See Prepub Alert, 8/8/16.]--Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2016

Francesca (Fran) Stubbs is a 70ish Londoner with a large circle of aging family and friends in various stages of decline, disease, and dementia. To the bewilderment of her children, Fran has moved into a sketchy apartment in a rundown neighborhood and continues to drive herself great distances around the English countryside to evaluate residential care homes for the elderly. When not working, Fran keeps busy visiting friends, preparing meals for them and for her bedridden ex-husband. Fran's son, Christopher, recently fired from his job as a TV culture critic, has decamped to the Canary Islands, where his girlfriend had taken ill and died suddenly while filming a documentary about undocumented African immigrants. With extreme winter weather threatening floods in England and earthquakes in the Canary Islands, the darkness closes in on Fran and her associates. VERDICT For women of a certain age, it is a pure pleasure to grow older alongside Drabble (The Pure Gold Baby; The Ice Age). For all others, there's plenty of joy to be had in this thoughtful meditation on aging and mortality. [See Prepub Alert, 8/8/16.]--Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.