Margaret drabble the dark flood rises discussion

          This novel is about growing older and facing death in the 21 st Century.

        1. This book is funny and sad, quite a wonderful discussion of how to live a life and how to leave it.
        2. It's a book about old age and death, but the ways in which it probes the interestingness of these scenarios makes it a very compelling novel.
        3. Margaret Drabble's sharply drawn characters look back on lives lived and forwards to achieving a good death.
        4. Drabble quotes from the first, somewhat darker in perspective than the second, in her meditation on old age and approaching death, The Dark Flood Rises.

          5. It's a book about old age and death, but the ways in which it probes the interestingness of these scenarios makes it a very compelling novel..

          The Dark Flood Rises

          novel by Margaret Drabble

          The Dark Flood Rises is the 19th novel of Margaret Drabble, and was first published in

          Theme

          The title of the book is a quotation from a poem, The Ship of Death, by D.

          H. Lawrence about mortality: “Piecemeal the body dies, and the timid soul/has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises.” The main theme is growing old and dying. It is told from multiple viewpoints, all of people linked in some way to Francesca (Fran) Stubbs, an elderly woman who does occasional work for a charity on aspects of living accommodation for the old.

          There is no strong plot: rather the book conveys different experiences of, and attitudes to, the twilight years of life, with the past histories of the main characters' lives being gradually revealed. In the background are two major contemporary concerns - climate change and the refugee crisis of the years during which it was written, to which there are frequent references: the flood in th