In this, her ninth novel, Maggie Gee has determinedly sought — like God in the beginning — to make the watery world she has created ‘teem with countless living creatures’. She did not, however, see to it that it was good. For The Flood teems not only with living things (birds ‘quivering, flashing on the flowering quinces’ or ‘narrow-faced, amber-eyed, rufous, fearless’ foxes, for example), but with torrents of gushingly overwritten prose that only serve to leave the reader bemused, overwhelmed and somewhat flushed.
Set in a dystopian ‘city of dreams’ confusingly semi-detached from reality, The Flood tells the story of a legion of inter-related characters — some of whom are familiar from earlier novels — seeking to conduct normal lives amid rising water levels. May is looking for her criminal son Dirk and mourning her husband Alfred; her daughter Shirley is trying to look after her twins Winston and Franklin, but must occasionally leave them with teenage fortune-teller Kilda; Kilda’s mother Faith cleans up after Lola, the spoilt daughter of designer mum Lottie, who attends university with Shirley; and so on.
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