Book review: When the Floods Came by Clare Morrall

Humanity is nothing if not predictable.

Faced with a civilisation-ending event, we tend to either band together for greater strength and survivability, embark on a means-justify-the-ends campaign of selfish aggrandisement or hide ourselves, willing the world to abandon us to our self-sufficient bolt-hole.

It’s this final option that has been chosen by the Polanskis of Birmingham, the emsemblic protagonists of When the Floods Came by Clare Morrall, who, survival-determining decisions aside, are anything but predictable.

In fact, faced with the end of the world, in which climate change has unleashed frightening landscape-altering floods on Britain and the Hoffman virus has whittled the population down to a largely sterile collection of older survivors known as “cobwebbies” and younger people, most of whom have settled in the new capital Brighton (London is supposedly flooded), the Polanskis have turned their self-sufficiency into the closest thing to a functioning society that the largely abandoned by the outside world country can offer.

The Britain that the Polanskis are familiar with – we familiar as you can be anyway when contact with other people is limited to slow internet chats and employment from far-off Chinese employers who care only about the work at hand and nothing much else such as the wider state of the world – is one of crumbling cities, scavenged supplies, goats and hens on the roof for food and increasingly rare airdrops from countries that has largely consigned the UK to history’s dustbin, and failing technology.

“Wyoming comes to life for a day, creating the impression that we’ve been invaded. Giggles, shrieks, and footsteps echo through the building, booming up and down the stairwells, while at other times the noise is more subdued, depending on who’s running and how much it matters to them. Wee Willie Winkie runs through the town, Upstairs and downstairs, in his nightgown.” (p.42)

In the face of all this loss, Popi and Moth (er), have created as close to an idyll as possible in Morrall’s bleak world, giving Roza, who is due to marry Hector from Brighton and move there under a law that mandates marriage by 25 (as an aid to boosting a much-diminished population), headstrong Boris, teenager Delphine and giddily happy 7 year old Lucia, a chance to exist without nasty blemish in a world that they come to understand over the course of Morrall’s beautifully-realised work, is blighted by the kind of naked brutality and selfishness that civilisation once so easily covered over.

But blocking out the cruel horrors of the present isn’t easy, made all the more difficult by the arrival of the mercurial Aashay Kent, who reveals little of his past and whose stories of the present change depending on the moment, alarming and enthralling the Polanskis, all of whom have markedly different reactions to him, in equal measure.

It becomes obvious to everyone in the family, especially the three older children all of whom are eager to escape the idyllic stagnation of their current life while simultaneously not wanting to let go of their eternal childhood, one defined by the nursery rhymes which are quoted throughout and woven seamlessly into the narrative, representing both innocence, and shared humanity, and the more dangerous elements of life in a brave, new world.

When the Floods Came is one of a new breed of insightful, clever post-apocalyptic novels in which humanity has emerged battered and bruised and often much-diminished physically and existentially from the end of the world, but emerged nonetheless.

The question always asked in these novels is always one of “where to now, and how?” rather than hands raised in abject surrender to elements far beyond our control.

As with its dystopian brethren, When the Floods Came doesn’t necessarily preach happy-ever-afters – the ending, which feels a little rushed after the meditative, languidly observant pace of much of the novel, offers both hope and caution – not easy solutions but it does maintain that solutions, albeit discoloured and corrupted by the tainted hands of human nature, are possible, something the fiercely-independent, secretive Polanskis, who never let anyone know where they live, agree with wholeheartedly.

“I can hear breathing. Of course. Everyone except me is asleep. Popi’s snoring, his breath entering and exiting his mouth with a strong, regular beat; Moth is whistling softly through her nose. Boris mutters to himself incoherently, Delphine whispers and Lucia sighs. There’s harmony in the breathing, a comfort, the gentle rise and fall of collective experience, a family sleeping together, dreaming of rhymes, of familiarity, of rhythm: Knocking on the window, calling through the lock, Are all the children fast asleep? It’s past eight o’clock.

“But I’ve heard something alien, something that shouldn’t be here. It’s a deliberate movement, the sound of someone awake and alert, someone with purpose. There’s a sense of stealth, secrecy. An interloper who knows the layout so well that he can move through the dark.” (p. 227)

The answers though that emerge from each member of the family as the novel progresses and their cosy little world is ripped asunder both dramatically and quietly step-by-revelatory-step, begin to diverge as each grapples with the changes wrought by strangers and an outside world, both benign and destructive, eager to get a hold on their home in the skyscrapers idyll.

Morrall’s prose, though exquisite and incisive and unfurled with the utmost care, nevertheless, bristles with deep emotions and insights, building chapter to chapter, in ways you don’t realise until the end, to a whole raft of realisations and decisions that will change the already much-changed world of the Polankis in wholly transformative ways.

This is dystopian literature that recognises the innate stubborn survivability in humanity, of our unwillingness to surrender who we are, and what, and more importantly who, matters to us without a fight, and which understands that even in the bleakest circumstances, that there are things about us that will suffer.

Ah but how will they endure? That is the million dollar question and one that Morrall handles poetically, decisively and with great wisdom and enthralling narrative intent rendering When the Floods Came one of the most grounded and knowing novels on the end of the world to come along in some time.