Not the End of the World

Having previously retold Moby Dick and The Canterbury Tales, McCaughrean now rises – like the proverbial waters – to the challenge of retelling the story of Noah’s flood from the point of view of its women and children characters, figures airbrushed out of the original ark-story.

In an engaging, vividly-voiced narrative, Timna, Noah’s daughter, records the destruction of the world and the events that followed. The reader is made witness to the unspeakable horror of the waters rising: writhing bodies swept to oblivion, Dante-esque in death; ill-fated ‘survivors’ clinging to churns and wineskins – flotsam figures, pleading for mercy. The messy reality of the floating menagerie is starkly documented: the original brutal culling of the animals into twos by Shem and Ham, Noah’s psychotic sons; the maddening incarceration of predator and prey entombed together. The rivalries and tensions of the human cargo are similarly depicted: Noah, an Ahab-like figure, following God’s orders for exclusive extermination with messianic zeal; Shem, his underling, a bass-voiced butcher, braying at any dissent.

From the novel’s first drop of rain to the ark’s final roost on dry land, McCaughrean’s language is characteristically controlled and accomplished. This is a compelling account of a frightening, confusing and unstoppable series of events. At the end of the story, however, what stands out above the masculine mayhem, is its female narrator, a new figure surveying a brave new world, sensible and sensitive and strong.