Review by New York Times Review
NOVELISTS, POETS, PHILOSOPHERS and theologians agree: Mortality, that relentless law of universal carnage, is the sole worthy human preoccupation. Still, it is the poets and novelists who have grappled least dispassionately with the cruel and steady majesty of time's engulfments. Howling Lear, stripped naked of his world. Ivan Ilyich, desolate on his deathbed, dismissed by the indifferent living. And through it all, the besotted Welshman's wild refrain, raging, raging, against the dying of the light. Margaret Drabble's contemporary England will have none of this. Modernity - salvific, hygienic, prophylactic, caring, taking every precaution - means to erase the howling and the indifference. The answer to creeping death is proper housing, or what American euphemism terms "senior living." There are to be no apocalyptic scenes of disintegrating horror. Death-the-leveler will be adjusted, via common-sense conferences and social service visits, to calm and flatness of tone. It is within the flatlands of the present tense, then, that Drabble sets Francesca Stubbs on her routine drives to distant parts of England to check out sheltered housing for the elderly. In her 70s, long divorced and the mother of two adult children, Fran is herself past retirement age. Yet she is in generally good health, has her own car, is satisfied with eating boiled eggs in mediocre hotels and is pleased to be employed by a charitable trust dedicated to the succor of the moribund. Where once solace for the very old meant faith in an afterlife, now God's mercy is replaced by practical ingenuity: "raised flower beds, patent window catches, isolation valves for gas appliances, key lockers for visiting carers." Fran recalls the quandary of a woman with weakened wrists who, after a minor stroke, died abandoned in her bathroom because she was unable to open the door to call for help: "If she'd had a lever-type doorknob instead of an old-fashioned screw doorknob, she'd be alive today." Fran is an unwitting Virgil who leads us through the circles of the hell of aging; but it is a hell where pragmatic thoughtfulness reigns and functional architecture is sustenance. Fran's friend Josephine, for instance, a former teacher of literature, has chosen to live out her days in Cambridge in a newly built imitation-Gothic Potemkin village designed to suggest that the old are still in student digs. Here Josephine presides over classes in writing where middle-aged would-be poets contemplate the Alzheimer's diminishment of fading parents. Claude, Fran's exhusband, once a highly successful physician, reclines in lavish invalid comfort on his day bed, the television soundless and his cat cozily in his lap, always in the company of Maria Callas's powerful recorded voice and sometimes, more intimately, in the arms of Persephone, his young caregiver. Fran prepares and delivers complex dinners that she knows will please him; it is a conscientious, not a wifely, act. Claude has tacitly announced his exit from the zone of the life-engaged. And so has Teresa, Fran's childhood friend, now painfully dying from asbestos poisoning. Teresa possesses what Fran does not: her Roman Catholic belief - yet what is the spiritual meaning of having stuck a thumbtack into a wall, thereby releasing its lethal fibers? Reunited after a separation of decades, Fran and Teresa remember how, as precocious little girls, they had talked of the evils of the world and whether or not God existed. Teresa for many years has been devoted to the needs of children in peril, but now, dependent on morphine for relief, she no longer leaves the precincts of her couch. She too, despite the promise of faith, is terminally housed. What sort of house shall I die in? is Drabble's unyielding question. Its veneer is serviceable - lever rather than screw - but its intent is not. Its intent is scriptural, invoking Ecclesiastes; or Socratic, wooing the examined life; or both at once. Whatever the domicile, the query is the same: the transcendent nature of human purpose, and how it will reveal itself. Poppet, Fran's oddly austere daughter, is possessed by such a purpose. Impassioned by ecological guardianship, she resides on a flood plain in a solitary little cottage close to a canal, following on her computer the condition of ice caps, coal emissions, quake tremors, pollution in Mongolia. She lives in expectation of inundation. Christopher, her brother, is far more sociable and worldly, yet unanchored and adrift. His career as co-producer of a television arts program, once promising, is now stalled, partly on his own account, but mainly because of the sudden death of Sara, with whom he had been collaborating on a human rights mission. Not unlike Poppet, Sara is stirred to the marrow by the fearful displacements of inundation. She hopes to produce a documentary that will expose the travail of the human flood of migrants from Africa - oppressed, unhoused, destitute - who are washing up on the several coasts of the Canary Islands, halfway between the continents. And there, on Lanzarote, a sunny volcanic outcropping where elderly British retirees are not uncommon, Sara, in the glory of her confident youth and with her lover looking on, eats a joyful dinner of limpets. But mortality is no respecter even of the young. A fatal deluge of cancerous cells has already condemned her, and soon after, in the wake of an emergency flight to England, she will quickly succumb. Bereft, the documentary scheme now defunct, Christopher is taken up by Bennett and Ivor, a gay couple who have long been resident on the island. Indulgent, sybaritic, tourist-crowded Lanzarote is nothing like Fran's damp and dour England, with its mundane social conscience. Bennett has settled here for the mild weather and its benefit to his declining health. And more: for the sake of a house "almost unnaturally beautiful," ideal for a man "who struggled for breath climbing stairs, . . . complete with pool, sun terrace, a well-planted euphorbia garden of many colors, a fish pool, a tennis court" and an unstinting view of the sea. He is favored as a local celebrity - a cultural historian, author of a number of original studies, lately drawn to art history. Even now he has his work. The handsome and much younger Ivor has none, except to look after Bennett, and to worry over his own accelerating wrinkles. At 17, strikingly golden-haired, he was "a pinup boy, a collector's item," collected by Bennett and dependent on him ever since. They are both aging, but Bennett is frail, susceptible to dangerous missteps. One day, cautious as always, he slips or trips on the familiar grounds of his beautiful house, while far away on her flood plain Poppet notes a slight volcanic tremor in the Canaries. Ivor, practiced in melancholy wisdom, accepts that he must return to England when Bennett dies. And when we last catch sight of him, a helper in a West Country monastic care home is pushing Ivor's wheelchair. Drabble has Fran tot it all up, not omitting the worst: Evolving models of residential care ... 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. . . . We arrive there . . . senseless, incontinent, demented, medicated into amnesia, aphasia, indignity. In the end, when the dark flood rises to cover these evolving models, however helpfully they have been updated (lever not screw, sun terrace and pool), their old people are anyhow all drowned. "The Dark Flood Rises" (the title is taken from a poem by D. H. Lawrence) is not a therapeutic, eschatological, sociological, political or even philosophical novel. Never mind that it can be mistaken for any or all of these. In one way, it is a hymn to an inherited England, to its highways, gardens, streets, hotels, neighborhoods, landscapes, parking lots, stoneworks, cottages, secluded and public spaces. Fran is "in love with England, with the length and breadth of England. . . . She wants to see it all before she dies." But this humane and masterly novel by one of Britain's most dazzling writers is something else as well, deeper than mere philosophy: a praisesong for the tragical human predicament exactly as it has been ordained on Earth, our terminal house. What sort of house shall I die in? is the unyielding question in Drabble's latest novel. CYNTHIA OZICK'S most recent book is "Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 1, 2017]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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." (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Right from the start, Drabble does not pull any punches: her novel is about death and dying. Although the topic may be somber, the novel is not depressing. It's a deep and thought-provoking examination of how people see age and the aging process-from the elderly student whose "old age shines with the aura of a lived life" to the protagonist who thinks "old age, it's a f***ing disaster." Instead of a conventional plot, Drabble uses the characters' interconnected-ness to hold the novel together. Drabble writes beautifully about the experiences of the friends and family of Francesca Stubbs, a seventysomething expert on housing for the elderly who drives around England for her job. The voice of Anna Bentinck, who doesn't have much dialog to work with, is captivating as she smoothly transitions from the thoughts of one character to another as Drabble moves from story to story in Francesca's circle. VERDICT Don't let the subject get you down. Drabble writes about death and dying, but she recounts stories of life and living. ["There's plenty of joy to be had in this thoughtful meditation on aging and mortality": LJ 12/16 starred review of the Farrar hc.]-Gladys Alcedo, Wallingford, CT © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
