The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

The setting of this masterful story is contemporary London, but one dominated by water: rain, rivers, canal boats, ponds. As the novel progresses, the characters’ only partially successful attempts to connect feel hampered by the decreasing definition of the boundaries between land and water. A sense of hopeless inevitability pervades every page, that in the world of this drowning London something has changed. Something irreversible.

This is weird fiction, remastered, at its best. The book oozes with brooding atmosphere, full of water: rain, rivers, floods, ponds, a mysterious drowning.

The characters regard unexplained events as normal and do not question them. Peculiar creatures are encountered but not reported. The obsession of several of the characters with Charles Kingsley’s The Water Babies adds to the mystery. It will appeal to admirers of J. G. Ballard and David Lynch. 

Shaw and Victoria meet on a wet afternoon and begin an on-off distance relationship. Both are trying to escape from humdrum jobs and the unambitious lifestyles of their… show more.