Ian Rankin
The Flood
For my father and mother
Many waters cannot quench love,
neither can the floods drown it.
Song of Songs
All one’s inventions are true.
Flaubert
Introduction
The Flood was my first published novel. It’s not a crime novel, though it contains secrets and revelations. Nor is it a thriller. Fair warning: it’s a young man’s book, all about the perils and pitfalls of growing up.
I wrote it when I was a student at Edinburgh University. I have the feeling it started life as a short story, only the story started to grow. Before I knew it, I had written a full twenty pages — too long for Radio 4’s short story slot (for which two of my stories had already been accepted), or for most of the magazines and other outlets for “shorties” that I knew of at the time. I decided that instead of trying to edit what I already had, I should just call it “part one” and keep going. I’d already written one novel, entitled Summer Rites, a black comedy set in a hotel in the Scottish Highlands. The plot revolved around a one-legged schizophrenic librarian, a young boy with special powers, and the abduction of a famous American novelist by the “provisional wing” of the Scottish National Party. Curiously, no one had seemed to agree with my judgment that Summer Rites was a fully realised contender for the title of Great Scottish Novel. Undaunted, I set about turning my short story The Falling Time into a new novel called The Flood.
I was reading a lot of Scottish literature at the time, as part of my PhD study into the novels of Muriel Spark. Looking at The Flood now, I can see influences peering back at me: Neil Gunn, Iain Crichton Smith, and especially Robin Jenkins (author of the marvellous The Cone Gatherers). Although The Flood was written in the mid-1980s, at a time when a fresh urban Scottish fiction was arriving — thanks to writers such as James Kelman — I decided that my own story would be local and rural, based in and around a fictitious coal-mining community. The problem was, I named my village Carsden, which is why a lot of people back in my hometown of Cardenden thought I was writing about them. It hardly helped that the main character was called Sandy the name of one of my school-friends — or that when I took the finished novel home to show my father, he perused the opening sentence and told me a woman called Mary Miller lived just over the back fence from him.
Turned out, I hadn’t disguised the place of my birth well enough.
Up to this point, I’d been writing a lot of “shorties”, very few of them ever picked up for publication. However, I’d had some success with a story called Walking Naked, which had been based on an actual event from my family’s history. In similar fashion, the original idea behind The Flood had been to describe a single scene — the moment when an aunt of mine (my father’s sister; a mere girl at the time) had fallen into a stream composed of hot waste water from the washing-plant of the local coal-mine. She sported long hair, of which she was inordinately proud. A young man saved her by hauling her out of the stream by that same coil of hair. It was a tale my father had told me, probably embellishing it for effect.
