Product Description

Mary Miller had always been an outcast. Burnt in a chemical mix as a young girl, sympathy for her quickly faded when the young man who pushed her in died in a mining accident just two days later. From then on she was regarded with a mixture of suspicion and fascination by her God-fearing community. Now, years later, she is a single mother, caught up in a faltering affair with a local teacher. Her son, Sandy, has fallen in love with a strange homeless girl. The search for happiness isn't easy. Both mother and son must face a dark secret from their past, in the growing knowledge that their small dramas are being played out against a much larger canvas, glimpsed only in symbols and flickering images - of decay and regrowth, of fire and water - of the flood.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36979 in Books
• Published on: 2008-08-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Barry Forshaw
Is it a comforting or precarious feeling, being the UK's number one best-selling male crime writer? Only Ian Rankin could answer that, but it's clear that the author is not content to rest on his laurels, and is always prepared to reinvigorate his excellent Inspector Rebus novels whenever a sense of déjà vu starts to creep in. And now we have Rankin's The Flood, a reissue of his first, unremarked novel. Was Rankin wise to sanction the re-release of this early book? After all, when we were given the chance to read again all the novels of Martin Cruz Smith had written before his groundbreaking Gorky Park, it was a sobering experience -- as the latter novel was a quantum leap in achievement beyond the previous books. Not so with The Flood: while this darkly disquieting novel caused ripples on its first publication, its reappearance after 20 years is something of a cause for celebration. Rankin began the novel as a 25-year-old student, and its publication by a small university publishing house (with a modest print run) escaped any critical attention. It took the atmospheric and gritty Rebus novels for us to see just how talented Rankin was, and it's a fascinating experience to re-encounter this tyro work.

The Flood is not a crime novel. Mary Miller is an alienated young woman. As a child, she had had an accident involving a flood of chemical discharges from the local coal mine -- she had survived, badly injured, but sympathy for her plight evaporated when the man who was responsible for the accident met his death in a mining accident shortly after. The pious community she lives in views her with superstitious dread. Time passes, and she gives birth to an illegitimate son, Sandy. Her unsatisfactory love affair with a teacher is going nowhere, and her son has started a relationship with a homeless girl. But both Sandy and his mother have to confront the past, and both find their lives will be changed by elemental forces -- notably the flood of the title.

As the above conveys, this is sombre stuff, but that won't put off Rankin aficionados, who look for the dark and disturbing in his work. While the book is (inevitably) not as fully achieved as his later work, there are many fascinating pre-echoes of the off-kilter psychology that is Rankin’s stock-in-trade, and any rough edges of the narrative are more than offset by the power of the already highly individual vision on offer here. --Barry Forshaw

GOOD BOOK GUIDE
'A must for lovers of Rankin'

Review
'A must for lovers of Rankin' (GOOD BOOK GUIDE )

'Full of secrets and revelations, with an atmospheric sense of time and place, it has Rankin's signature darkness' (CHOICE )

'It wouldn't take a Rebus to sleuth out the telltale signs of a talent in the making' (Chris Power THE TIMES )

Customer Reviews

Unusual coming of age story
Having now read a few of his Rebus novels, I picked this book up looking for something different by Ian Rankin. I wasn't disappointed.

The Flood is an unusual coming-of-age narrative that takes place in a small Scottish ex-mining community over two generations. It handles a range of themes including small town prejudice, alcholism, bigotry, incest, abuse, guilt and social isolation. It tracks two generations of a family from the 1970s to the present day as the social infrastructure of their surrounding community gradually disintegrates and self-destructs.

Mostly the narrative is taken from the view of a boy as he comes of age in a bigotted community that shuns his mother and questions his parenthood. This is a richly painted narrative full of sensitive insight and deep characterisation.

I won't say more - I found the novel moving and interesting. Although there is partial resolution at the end - one of the central mysteries is clarified - it does feel incomplete as if more is to come.

Nevertheless a very good read.

Too drawn out and no proper ending
This is the first full novel that Ian Rankin ever wrote, having previously only written some short stories. In the recently-added introduction he says that he started writing this as a short story and later developed it into a full-length novel; it certainly shows. The story is not just slow, there is so little plot or storyline to it that it is really all about characterisation and insights into family and community matters, without anything significant actually happening for most of the book. It really needs more of a storyline to carry it along. Had it been short-story length it would have been OK.

The ending is dreadful - the book just sort of fizzle out. After reading such a slow, dragging story I felt quite cheated by it all.

There are indications of Ian Rankin's skill as a writer, but overall this book left me wondering why I bothered reading it. I'll stick to his Rebus novels in future.