The Dark Flood Rises

This searingly sad but often hilarious novel chronicles the last dance of a few old codgers, and Drabble (The Sea Lady) has filled her tale with characters desperately trying to make sense of life and loss, of beauty, talent, missed opportunities, faded passion. She burrows inside the head of Fran, a manic 70-something elder-care specialist who drives around England studying—but would never in a million years actually live in—retirement communities. She introduces us to Fran’s literary friend Josephine, with whom she shared her first few harrowing years of solitary “baby-minding,” and who now teaches adult- and continuing-ed classes, and to Claude, Fran’s ex-husband, whose career as a surgeon left Fran home alone to take care of the children. Claude is now bedridden, listening to his beloved Maria Callas while waiting for Fran to bring him plated dinners. We meet Fran’s childhood friend Teresa, dying of cancer, and Bennett, a benignly pompous Spanish Civil War expert who lives with the slightly younger Ivor in the Canaries. Fran’s two children, Christopher and Poppet, provide some relief from hammer toes, fractured hips, and terminal illness. Each character has a passion—classical music, art history, Beckett, Unamuno, and Yeats—which gives rise to Drabble’s exposition on issues that dog her. And expound she does, on “effortless, meaningless, soulless beauty,” on the philosophy of free will and coincidence (including Jung, Catholicism, and moral luck), indeed on “what on earth literature is for.” (Feb.)