The Dark Flood Rises - Thorndike Press Large Print Core Series | Mystery Thriller Novel for Book Clubs & Nighttime Reading

The Dark Flood Rises is not a novel I should have liked. It is mostly tell, not show. The few direct quotes are buried in long paragraphs of narration. The point of view hops from character to character, sometimes two or three times in a single page. Once in a while, an omniscient narrator intrudes in the manner of a nineteenth century novel. None of the characters experience a dramatic arc unless death and increasing decrepitude qualify for internal transformation. All have had successful careers, with multiple published books among them, and they all know one another, proving again that England must be a very small country. The author has an intimidating vocabulary; not even the online dictionaries I checked knew several of the words, at least not in the context they were used. And there are some dreadful examples of overwriting. (E.g., describing the cessation of a series of earthquakes: “the surges of time’s troubled fountains have abated.”)Yet I did enjoy it as a meditation on aging, although it began with a depressing thesis: "Her inspections of evolving models of residential care and care homes for the elderly have made her aware of the infinitely clever and complex and inhumane delays and devices we create to avoid and deny death, to avoid fulfilling our destiny and arriving at our destination." Indeed, the old in the book either lie moribund in a sybaritic antechamber to death (tastes differ, of course: for one it’s neon-colored meals in chain hotels, for another it’s drinking only the best wines) or divert themselves with trivial intellectual projects (the shape of clouds or deceased wife’s sisters fiction.) The young (albeit, not too much younger) at least work on social improvement (a doctor in Africa, a filmmaker documenting the European immigration crisis, a climate change activist), yet it’s not clear their projects are different from their parents’, they just have an expanded range to work in. I don’t know if the author intended it, but I was left with the impression that all humans spend our lives in the denial of death. It's more obvious for the elderly, not just that they are closer to the inevitability of death, but they physically (and often mentally) have less room to play in.Despite lapses, the novel is beautifully written. (E.g., “He is as indistinct as water is in water.") The discursive internal dialogues of each character reveal the extremely intelligent and sophisticated mind that conjured them.