Blog entry supplemental twenty two: After the Flood
At last, it’s here!
After promising you the first chapter of my sixth novel, I’m finally in a position to deliver. After the Flood is (as regular readers will be aware) also the fifth novel in the Lights in the sky sextet.
The opening is very much in the tradition of ‘it was a dark and stormy night’, although we a very quickly plunged into the world of 2043. I wrote the four lines of verse that provide an epigraph for the chapter, and the novel is book-ended by a much longer poem which closes the narrative. The story is about the Great Flood of London of 2043, and was originally called ‘The Great Flood’, but the title changed (as they often do) to be replaced by the rather less matter of fact and rather more evocative present title, with its Biblical connotations (and indirect reference to Bob Dylan).
After the Flood is also more appropriate because almost the whole of the novel is about what happens next. We follow a group of people, most of whom we meet in this opening chapter, who survive the Deluge, and we see how they cope and how they attempt to repair or in most cases remake their lives in the chaos and the loss that follows the inundation of London.
In chapter one we see the arrival of the Great Wave which devastates London from the point of view of our diverse group of protagonists. All of whom survive (in one case miraculously), while others around them perish. These people are ordinary and flawed; they are not necessarily the right people (i.e. those that deserve to live), and all suffer from what you might term ‘survivor’s guilt’ at various times and to various degrees.
All are changed by their experiences (though some more than others), and most become better people.
Chapter one is necessarily episodic, as I try to portray the implacability and the sheer inevitability of the cataclysm as it unfolds (at times almost in slow motion). Thus we have a fractured narrative; unsurprising as the events are told from a variety of perspectives, but also because I want to put over how such an event would be experienced by those caught up in it, and convey the overwhelming feelings of shock and dislocation they would feel.
A friend who is reading the novel described it as ‘your disaster movie’, and (like all Lights in the sky novels), it is written with adaptation in mind. Dialogue is important, but it is balanced by the interior monologue of the main characters, the pace (initially at least) is frenetic, and I have tried to convey visually the impact of the Event on the ancient city of London.
And on re-reading this chapter I am convinced more than ever that I have succeeded in my aims. See if you agree…
The Author December 2018