I’ve wondered if it ever really happened. Madmen turned out of towns and villages and sent to sea, and allowed to get on with being mad as hatters, without bothering anyone by it. [p. 33]
A devastatingly hot summer: London bookseller John Cole decides, on the spur of the moment, to pay a visit to his brother who lives on the Norfolk coast. Within a couple of hours he's lost in the woods. Then, searching for help, he finds himself at a grand house. They've been expecting him, they say: they call him by name. He keeps meaning to correct them, to apologise for imposing on them, but somehow the time is never quite right.
And he is captivated by the six people who call the house their home: Hester the theatrical matriarch, twins Clare and Alex, former preacher Elijah, beautiful Eve, and suspicious Walker. They are bound together by a complex web of love in many different forms, and John -- to whom love is a foreign country -- can't help wanting to draw closer. Life here is idyllic, almost childlike. There are long afternoons in the garden, and piano music, and drink. On the one occasion when they venture out into the world, it is brutal.
This is not an Eden without a serpent, though. Alex is receiving poison-pen letters about flooding, which is his obsession. The letters are signed 'Eadwacer', a name from an Anglo-Saxon poem (read it here), and is becoming increasingly distressed by what he believes are cracks in the reservoir beside the house. John wonders if the poem has some other relevance. What binds these people together?
This is an odd novel, dreamlike and Gothic and claustrophobic. I'm not sure I like the characters, and really very little happens: but there is something mythic about the week that John spends in the house, and something Biblical about the setting.
This was Perry's first novel: I enjoyed The Essex Serpent more, but After Me Comes the Flood has a surreal atmosphere that lingered long after I'd finished the book.
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