DELUGE by Richard Doyle

"Kennington Park Road - water entering from north-east," called out the officer in charge and another marker was moved up. The pattern was becoming clear; the surge had spilled over in Bermondsey and was cutting across the bend in the river into Lambeth. By the time the tide overtopped on the other side, along the Albert Embankment, people trying to escape southwards would find themselves trapped with the river at their backs. His thoughts were interrupted by an urgent shout from Carswell.

"Derek," the Controller's face was pale with dismay, "it's the Undergound," he said in an unnaturally high voice. 

"They still have passengers in the tubes."

It's panic on the streets of London (and all up and down the eastern English coast for that matter) as hurricane force winds drive the storm of the century up the Thames, threatening seven million souls with a horrible death via an inescapable DELUGE!

After an exciting opening with a threatened freighter in the North Sea and reports of record surges from coastal towns, we quickly bog down into bureaucratic exposition as Peter Collins (Flood Room officer on standby) and displaced Kiwi Derek Thompson (Chief Engineer to the London City Council) feel out the first warning signs and begin their doomed attempts at prodding the system into action. We know exactly how that's going to go, don't we ... This is a necessary part of any disaster narrative, the pregnant menace, the foreknowledge that something's terribly wrong. We spend a little too much time here, though, and the first third of the story starts to feel like we're wading through hip deep water, sloshing and straining to make any progress. Eventually the storm arrives and things really get bent, as we're hoping, but it's rough going getting there, with too much back and forth with a slimy Labour pol named Miles Wendoser doing everything he can to stymie emergency efforts for fear of panic. Big mistake, we know! Wendoser is a plastic politician in the Tony Blair mold, with no real principles or scruples beyond what's best for his image in any given moment. Oh yes, and to make things worse, the American President is due for a tour!

Hardcover jacket artwork

Thompson has a memory of a flood back in New Zealand, which wiped out a tiny village, and he shudders at the thought of that power brought to bear on a modern metropolis. Doyle takes a ghoulish glee in showing us exactly how awful a flood could get in a modern city, with bridges smashed by loose barges, power plants blown up, slums flooded out and gas lines exploding, hospitals becoming death traps, those poor bastards in the tube, all this and more, and everywhere masses of people trapped by the rising waters and left to die by a government paralyzed by indecision and ignorance. Doyle doesn't mind dispatching his characters with clinical precision, sometimes scores at a time, sometimes in singular vignettes, and he does a good job for the most part in sketching people in before they meet their fates - it's a cross section of '70s society in the UK here, with "colored" chaps and working girls, pensioners and posh types all in danger from the flood. Nobody deserves what they get, and here Doyle is effective in illustrating the sheer waste and folly on the human level within a massive catastrophe, and the very human decisions that play into the death toll from a "natural" disaster.

Above, an American edition from Bantam Books, 1978. There's much to like here but the pacing is just too off. Doyle would revisit this setup a quarter century later as Flood, from 2002. The description makes it sound like more of a modern thriller, with American and NATO forces aiding Britain and "an explosion the size of a small Hiroshima" ... I wonder how much Doyle's style evolved over the years, for better or for worse? A great-nephew of Arthur Conan Doyle as noted above, Richard Doyle (1948-2017) has a brief but intriguing wikipedia page and was especially concerned, it is said, with the effects of climate change. After slogging through this bleak but unsatisfying read, maybe you'll spare a moment in thought as well ...

Deluge earns a disappointing 2/4 rating.

Pan, 1978 (original pub. 1976)