After Me Comes the Flood

A mixed bag. Bits of it are very good indeed, there are some fine ideas and some lovely writing going on here. There is a clear attempt to build up the tension throughout the story, and the final denouement scene is wonderfully dramatic. BUT! Whilst perhaps the theme of the story might be 'we're all mad to someone else' it's kind of othering, as if there are mentally ill people and there are normal people and sometimes people from one category slip into the other without anyone noticing. I dunno, maybe I'm biased but my condition isn't a kooky plot point. The characterisation isn't always great. Aside from the narrator all the others are kind of ciphers. John never really investigates them, and as a consequence we don't really show more understand their motivations or see them as whole entire people. But there's part of a great piece in here, and I would definitely read another of her novels. show less

This novel is set over a few days towards the end of the 1976 heatwave, in a big house, near a reservoir. John Cole, lost on a drive in the countryside, comes up to the house to ask for directions, but is greeted by someone who knows his name and seems to be expecting him. Disoriented by the days of heat and by the strange mixture of people already living in the house - all of whom give him a warm welcome - John never quite gets around to explaining the mistaken identity, and when he answers the phone to the real expected guest saying that he is delayed for at least a week, he decides to stay on.

With him, we get to know the other residents, and learn that they have come together after meeting in a genteel psychiatric institution. One show more of the residents, Elijah, is a priest who has lost his faith; another, Alex, is obsessed with the idea that the heatwave is creating cracks in the reservoir and when the rain falls again the dam will break.

Sarah Perry has done an extremely effective job of creating an unsettling atmosphere for the reader, from John's narrative voice and frequent confusion, to the almost complete lack of any context for the world around our characters. The landscape, too, is deceptive:

To his right as he walked were the long narrow gardens of the last houses before the sea; to his left, several feet below, was the low stretch of land that was drowned and revived every day by the industrious tides. It was an indistinct landscape riddled with irregular channels that ran into and out of each other everywhere he looked. Late in the day water would seep from under the soft mud and trickle unhurriedly in fine rivulets, gathering speed until the tide was high.

This makes the reader more sympathetic to the characters as we too are not quite sure of the ground beneath our feet. In some ways it makes this a bit of a challenging read, but fortunately I enjoy books that make me work a bit to understand what is going on; and there is enough here that I think I would enjoy reading it again, now that I do know the context a bit better. show less

''What surprises me isn't that we sin, but that we manage a single good action in all of our lives.''

A strange array of people has gathered in a cottage in the marshlands. An endless heatwave and the unbearable drought create a suffocating atmosphere that gives rise to the boiling conflicts between the members of the fellowship. One of them is John Cole, an enigmatic Londoner, who has found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. Who are these people? Why are they there, battling a cruel summer and each other? What is the story of the houses and why does John feel watched and threatened?

''I've been listening for footsteps on the stairs or voices in the garden, but there's only the sound of a household keeping quiet.''

This is the show more debut novel of Sarah Perry, the astonishing writer who has given us the beautiful The Essex Serpent and the inimitable, shuttering Melmoth. As always, Perry's story is woven in rich atmosphere and symbolism. There is an eerie quietness and the ''heavy'' feeling of rain that never comes. A strange name appears everywhere and must not be uttered. Questions of identity, secret desires, hallucinating dreams. Everyone's minds are occupied by a nameless threat that is lurking and the fear of a flood permeates the story. With a dreamy combination of an underlying sexuality and themes of Religion, Perry creates a novel that requires patience, dedication and a certain clarity of mind.

''Where is the horse gone'', she read. ''Where the rider...'' ''...and where the giver of treasure...''

''Someone had broken the spine of a book and left it open on the lawn, and near the windows rosebushes had withered back to stumps. A ginger cat with weeping eyes was stretched out in the shade between them, panting in the sun.''

I won't insult your intelligence by being Miss Obvious, stating what a unique writer Sarah Perry is. This is universally acknowledged. She has taken all the characteristics of British Mystery and the effect of the atmospheric marshlands to compose a story where paranoia and seduction are highlighted by strange bird cries, fleeting visions of a woman in black and a door that must remain closed. In rich symbolism and Gothic motifs, Perry paints a story where no one moves for fear of revealing themselves and their motives.

''When I was young, it used to frighten me- I didn't think a painting should look at me like that. Sometimes I'd stand directly in front of it, and see my own reflected face laid over hers, and I would wonder which of us was painted, and who was watching whom''

Sarah Perry's novel is like a mysterious, sultry summer evening. Like all her books, After Me Comes The Flood is a very particular story for very particular readers...

''I gave my love an apple, I
gave my love a pear;
I gave my love a kiss on the
lips
And threw him down the
stairs.''

Many thanks to HarperCollins and Edelweiss for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/ show less

The girl gave a snort of disdain. ‘I don’t like that story – not at all. I don’t even know what it means – do you?’ ‘No, and no-one ever has, not in a thousand years.’ He lifted a strand of her hair from the pillow between them. ‘But it need not mean anything, I think – it’s not necessary to understand everything.'

Flood is an easy book to dislike. It struck me almost immediately as a work that the critics and other authors love, but that lacks popular appeal. To say that this slim novel is lightly plotted overstates the amount of plot in it by a wide margin. Narrative largely absents itself from Perry's debut work too, at least in the sense that most fiction readers have come to expect. All of which is to say one show more thing and not say another. I am saying I understand why this book has such a low average rating given how what most people read is written. I am not saying that I disliked it, which I assume my rating of it makes clear, but I figured I'd say so to head off any suspicions that I'd misclicked and hit the wrong star.

It concerns itself with its characters, not any sort of overarching narrative. And it does so quite deftly and interestingly. Perry wove them together such that what one bumps up against always repercusses onto at least some of the others.

The scantness of plot and conventional narrative meant that this was no page-turner for me. And that's fine. In a way, this worked out well for me: until today, that being the day I finished it and wrote this review, my free time had been scant too, so I appreciated being able to set aside what I was reading with relative ease.

This is the only one of Perry's books I've read thus far, and being her first, it's hard to say how representative it is. At least in this, her style reminds me most readily of M. John Harrison. The lightness of plot. That much is unexplained. Characters meander. Often what one character says seems unconnected from what her interlocutor said immediately prior. However, she eschews the weirdness Harrison often puts in his books.

These scarcities keep you in the dark. I had no guesses whatsoever what might happen to resolve or not the various threads. Would John finally come clean? Would the dam burst? What is Hester's deal? Would Alex's dives into the reservoir be his undoing? Nor was I particularly concerned with these questions. Having no feeling as to how they might be resolved, if at all, I felt no great urge to speculate upon them. Not plot points, they are things that are going on around and to the characters.

This creates a lot of subtle tensions though. Plenty to keep a reader curious even if not glued to it. Though I lay it down easily, I always picked it back up, and once I had the time, I finished it quickly enough. And so, if you like plotless stories, light narrative, and/or M. John Harrison, don't be put off by Flood's low rating. show less

This book will stay with me for a long time. Beautifully written, the viewpoint is mostly inside the head of the narrator, who arrives ill and confused at a house containing people who seem close but not related. He decides (or rather doesn't decide) to pretend to be the visitor they were waiting for, as they are kind and he clearly needs a place to be. The book's descriptions are so intimate, and the relationships so clearly shown that it's like the reader is also an unexpected visitor who's decided to stay.

I picked Sarah Perry's first book up on a whim because I've really enjoyed her other two. This was also good and in the same vein, with a gothic, mysterious feel. A man leaves his bookstore rather dramatically to visit his brother and on the way becomes ill and his car breaks down. He ends up stumbling upon an old house where he is welcomed by name, though he knows no one there and doesn't know how they know him. The inhabitants are all a little off, and it is slowly revealed where he has ended up and the back story.

I liked this and saw a lot of promise in it, but the plot seemed like it would have been better suited to a short story. It lost some of the creepiness and suspense of the first section as the book went along. Fans of Sarah show more Perry might like this to see how she's developed as a writer, but I'd recommend The Essex Serpent as the better book and better starting place. show less

Read: August 2019
Rating: 1/5 stars
I found this to be such a disappointment after reading The Essex Serpent, which I thought was excellent. I struggled with the lack of plot, lack of likeable or relatable characters and the writing style - switching from first to third person perspective and back again.
In the end I abandoned this book at 58% so I cannot comment on whether the plot improved in the second half but I don’t plan on finishing it to find out!