Sarah Perry’s After Me Comes the Flood begins one summer in London, on the 30th day without rain. Sun blazes out of a blank sky, heat beats “like a hammer on the pavement”, silencing the birds. A bookseller shuts up his shop and flees the city, but in his sunstruck confusion forgets a map. Lost, he comes upon a cool holloway, “a tunnel of green shade” that leads to “the edge of a dying lawn sloping slightly upward to a distant house … it seemed to me the most real and solid thing I’d ever seen, and yet at the same time a trick of my sight.” A child’s voice calls his name and he enters.
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| Ripeness is exciting, but also threatening, overwhelming – a worry traced again and again through female sexuality. Atonement, 2007. |
The reader enters oddly familiar territory, too – territory that has seemed so ever since LP Hartley published The Go-Between in 1953. Hartley’s mesmerising novel about 12-year-old Leo, who finds himself, under slightly false pretences, in a grand house in Norfolk in a heatwave in 1900, was of course not the first to use summer as a framing device. There was Edith Wharton’s uneven but lingering 1917 novel Summer, for instance, and F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) – but Hartley understood so well what summer allowed, it is sometimes hard not to see everything else in its light. “In the heat the senses, the mind, the heart, the body, all told a different tale,” as Leo puts it. “One felt another person, one was another person.” So too for the novelist, who is suddenly given the freedom to explore ideas and dilemmas that would have seemed implausible if the weather had stayed cool.
Read her story Aida Edemariam from The Guardian - “Boiling point: why literature loves a long, hot summer.”
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