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 by Mark Morris
Back in 1975 a new TV series called Survivors debuted on BBC1 in the UK. The series was created by Terry Nation, who twelve years earlier had ensured the success of the BBC’s flagship science-fiction show, Doctor Who, by inventing the Daleks. Described as a ‘speculative drama’, Survivors was about the travails of a disparate band of Brits who survive a biological pandemic that, within days, wipes out 99% of the world’s population. These people must get by in a world that, to all intents and purposes, has been plunged back into the Dark Ages; a world where law and order has suddenly been rendered meaningless, and where the currency is no longer money, but fuel and food.
The series – which has obvious parallels to Stephen King’s The Stand, published three years later in 1978 – fascinated me. It brought to light questions and dilemmas we are thankfully cushioned against in our cosy, modern lives. In one devastating episode a mentally disabled man is accused (wrongly) of raping and murdering a female member of the community. With no real understanding of the crime, and no means of defending himself, the accused becomes as much a victim as the murdered woman. Unable to get to the real truth of what happened, it is left to the other members of the community to decide what to do with him. If they were to banish him, what would stop him simply coming back and committing a similar crime? And to imprison him would be nothing but a burden on an already over-stretched and hungry community. In the end, therefore, after much moralising, it is decided that the only feasible course of action is capital punishment. The man, still not understanding quite what is going on, is subsequently taken outside and shot. Although we do not see the execution itself, the episode remains one of the most shocking, emotionally upsetting hours of drama ever witnessed on British TV. Most series, I am sure, would have veered away from such a harrowing conclusion. Even at the time, I remember thinking that the identity of the real killer would be discovered with moments to spare, and that the innocent man (who is also innocent in the sense that he is gentle and child-like and utterly lovable) would be granted a reprieve.
But Survivors was not like that. Intelligent and never sensationalistic, for the three series it ran on British TV it never flinched from depicting the harshest realities of everyday life in a tough, uncaring world. In short, it never pulled its punches.
Needless to say, the programme made a huge impression on me, and was my first point of reference when it came to writing The Deluge. Because of my love for the series, I had always had it in my head to one day write something dark, dystopian, apocalyptic. I had touched upon it in some of my earlier work, perhaps most notably The Secret of Anatomy, but I had never gone the whole hog. Suddenly, however – and don’t ask me why – the time finally seemed right.
One thing I knew I definitely wanted to do, though, was to make life for my survivors a hell of a lot tougher than it had been for their BBC counterparts. On TV the survivors had still had cars to get around in and plenty of fuel to keep them running; they had had supermarkets full of food; fruit on the trees; livestock roaming the countryside; clothes and blankets and plenty of warm, dry houses in which to take shelter.
My aim was to do away with all of that, not least because I knew that to tell my story as concisely and quickly as the medium demanded I had to motivate my characters in a different way. And so I came up with a flood of Biblical proportions, something massive and mysterious and utterly devastating, which would not only wipe out most of the world’s population, but also many of the resources on which the BBC survivors had relied in order to…well, survive.
My survivors, therefore, would have to cope with destruction on an unprecedented scale. They would have to learn to live in a world turned upside-down. Apres la deluge, as it were, the streets into which the survivors eventually emerge are nothing but a quagmire of debris. Mud and bodies are everywhere, motor vehicles are nothing but useless heaps of rusting, flooded junk, and the contents of stores – food, clothing, medication – have been rendered inedible or unusable.
Naturally by creating such a profoundly altered world, I also created a huge number of logistical headaches for myself. I had to re-think every aspect of daily life: what would the survivors eat? Where would they find shelter? How would they get about? How would they stay dry? How would they wash and dry their clothes? How would they cope with injury or illness?
Although it remained a challenge throughout the writing of the book, in the end the process of tackling and dealing with these and dozens of other problems became fun, like a series of puzzles I had to solve, one after another, in order to keep the story moving. And of course, upon creating such a world, you quickly realise that some things become unresolvable, that some questions can never be answered – but that’s all part of the fun too.
When all is said and done, my only hope is that I have created a vivid and believable setting for the novel, and that I have told a good enough story to keep my readers enthralled throughout. Most of all, I hope I have managed to do justice to the brilliant old BBC series to which The Deluge is my idea of a homage.
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