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Product Description
JG Ballard
‘Gripping, original and highly entertaining – Maggie Gee at her superb best.’
Hilary Mantel
‘Eloquent, angry and beautiful . . . her best book yet.’ Hilary Mantel
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dazzling Writing,
By Booksthatmatter "Booksthatmatter" (Brighton, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Flood (Hardcover)
Maggie Gee has pulled off a remarkable piece of writing in The Flood. She manages to juggle serious political issues, a HUGE cast of characters and a highly interconnected plot-line with verve and flair. The Flood never falls short of being gripping.The world of the novel is a very plausible version of our own, where global climate change and political instability combine to create a firghtened world on the blink. The president Mr Bliss is a convincing spawn of our own Mr Blair and the characters are ourselves in slightly more tense circumstances: war is raging in the hotter continents and conscription is being rumoured all to deflect attention from the political turmoil at home, where constant rain threatens our whole infrastructure. But for some life goes on, gilded gondolas carry the rich to the opera house across the flooded streets, books are written, read and published. There's a particularly enjoyable satire of modern publishing running through the book as well. I think there is something of Doris Lessing's post-apocalyptic Mara and Dann and Gee confidently knocks spots off the clunky satire of JG Ballard's Millenium People. The book is definitely a 'message' book - but what makes it so wonderful is the living breathing characters that populate it so amply. My best read of the year so far. It would also be a great one for a reading group to get its teeth into.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Modern urban life redeemed,
By
This review is from: The Flood (Hardcover)
This novel portrays in full glowing detail the lunacy, mendacity and life-diminishing triviality of the modern urban world, through whose awful pall appear here and there shafts of golden humanity. The widow repining for her adored Alfie, who had been a park keeper, measuring everything against his principled standards and blaming herself for the failings of her disturbed son. The celebrity who leaves the care of her precocious daughter to her parents while vaunting herself as a 'caring mother', then overhears a wounding remark and guiltily recognizes that she has deprived her daughter of what she needs most. The abject hopelessness of the poor who return to filthy tower blocks after cleaning the houses of the privileged. The myopic smugness of the in-crowd; the inflated egos and competitive jealousies of political, literary and art world media icons. The intensity of language is such that, at a certain point, the reader recognizes that he is reading poetry; not prose, then slows his pace and pronounces each word to savour the cadences. The book concludes by endorsing Love as the one value that redeems awfulness. Fellow authors (of which I am one) will envy Maggie Gee her talent. I suspect that no one else could have depicted this subject so accurately and with such delicate and indefatigable wit. She has found just the right form, just the right words and just the right story, a majestic achievement.
2.0 out of 5 stars
A sequel that isn't one,
By Nikki King (London, England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Flood (Paperback)
Some of the characters from the White Family pop up again. Its another analysis of life in the modern world, again with some over-laboured points and analogies with the 'real world' (its set in a fictional place). A page turner nonetheless
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