The Flood
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Review
'Gripping, original and highly entertaining - Maggie Gee at her superb best.' J G Ballard 'Dazzling ... alternately lyrical and austere ... unbearably touching.' The Observer 'Eloquent, angry and beautiful ... her best book yet.' Hilary Mantel 'The Flood is Gee's most apocalyptic vision to date ... an incredible feat of sustained imaginative continuity.' The Guardian 'A Must-Read Book for 2004.' Daily Mail ' ... an addition to an eccentric but valuable tradition of English fiction ... in which the visionary and the mundane mingle, producing effects by turn comical and grand.' Sunday Times 'Gee's ability to ask big "what if?" questions while never losing sight of the humdrum details of life ... gives her un-brave new world credibility.' The Independent '...exhuberant ... I thoroughly enjoyed it.' Sunday Telegraph 'The Flood, for all its passion and intricacy, is also a very funny book ... rewarding ... carefully written, using language echoing the water that ebbs and flows, and eventually floods the pages.' TLS ' ...a rare writer who is willing to address issues topical to contemporary Britain' Daily Telegraph 'A playful apocalypse.' The Bookseller ' ... a surprising melange of fantasy, realism, and very dry humour' Big Issue ' ... startling, insidious imagery' Metro 'Gee's admirably dyspeptic and frequently funny novel is a wake-up call to us all' Mail on Sunday
Daily Telegraph, February 5, 2005
'Beautiful recurring imagery ... Gee explores the fears that sink us, and the hopes that keep us afloat.'
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Format: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
Format: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.
Format: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
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Buy It!
Having never read anything by this author before I didn't really know what to expect. I can say honestly that this is the best book I've read in ages. Read more
Published on 2 May 2005
Help I'm drowning - where's the Ark?
As the previous reviewer has set the scene for you, you will have a tasteof what the book is about. In addition, I would say that this book is alsoa modernisation of the Noah's Ark... Read more
Published on 26 April 2004
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