The Night of the Flood by Zoë Somerville
Review by Jess Moody
‘That was the thing about tides. They came back.’
1952, the Norfolk coast. Here, locals remember how they watched German bombers heading back East without fear: they knew the planes would be empty, their payloads already spent on destruction far away.
This sense of empty things, of purpose at once inevitable and somehow past, one eye warily on fate, seeps through Zoë Somerville’s The Night of the Flood. Based on the true events of the North Sea tragedy, this is the story of lives both interconnected and wholly unseeing. It is a liminal time: three figures facing a certainty of change, and the horror of stagnant, salted conservatism.
Verity is desperate to escape her mother’s half-lived fate — to escape the landed classes for the independence of University — but cannot shake off a childhood attachment. Arthur, her would-be lover, arrives back from National Service to find himself ostracised by class privilege and antisemitism. He eyes the new geopolitics with journalistic suspicion. Meanwhile, Peter, Verity’s brother, clings to an idea of gentlemanly masculinity, while isolated with his own queer desires.
Into these lives enters Jack, the American airman with mysterious missions, who arouses passions and possessiveness in all three. Somerville is conscious of the risks of melodrama here. The idea of the glamourous stranger representing a bright new world of freedom and liberation is explored but not uncritiqued. Jack is, in fact, another creature struggling amidst others’ expectations. He evokes desire without beauty, misunderstanding with silence; his cryptic teasing and unexplained choices bely his taunts about the ‘funny’ English and their failure to speak their truths. The only main character whose direct point of view is never shared with the reader, he is an effective mirror to existing chasms in these relationships which have come of age.
The intimacies of this group develop over a year's steady countdown to the eponymous night of the flood. Time and timeliness are key themes in this study of life lived by the sea, in this age of change, amidst those on the cusp of adulthood. The weather forecast intoned before each section of the book brings an inevitability and a particular biting edge to the dramas as they unfold: we know, from the preface, that not all will survive the danger to come.
Somerville keeps that particular mystery well, but ensures that it is not the sole focus of the novel. There is texture and patience here. The four protagonists are bound up in a number of concerns beyond their quartet with a range of well-drawn minor characters. With this, the novel evokes well the realities of a small interdependent community. The character of Muriel, the fisherman’s daughter, red-lipped and hungry, is an astute choice: her occasional commentaries accompany the reader on their journey, combing the beach with a cool eye to see what the water will leave in its wake.
For all its focus on well-spoken young things and class divides, this is no ‘sitting room’ drama, or period piece of manners. The land, the weather, the abandoned places, all bring a physicality both brutal and intimate. These are bleak years: of rationing and suicide, of burning alcohol on nervous tongues, of sexual ignorance played out in moulding cabins and on dusty floors.
When danger arrives in its various forms — encroaching slowly, or pulling them from their feet in the dark — these characters do not know how to help to each other. These are people who are never quite allowed to see, to hear: they exist in a place of labyrinthine marshes, and shifting lights in the night, where mist and murk mute confidences, and words and trusts are whipped away in the winds.
The Night of the Flood is a literary historical fiction which balances personal hearts and histories with the grand geopolitics of nuclear proliferation, and radical social change. The narrative is unafraid of pacing, of repeating, of reiterating, in order to distil their tensions. Each character is permitted their own views of calamity: through the camera lens, through the window, now down at the bay. Somerville is unafraid of disrupting the picturesque — to show us what happens alone in the darkness, with only the roar of the waves.
The Night of the Flood is published by Head of Zeus, 3rd September 2020