Yet even he admits there’s something “odd” about the sheer relentlessness of this particular downpour. “You don’t live your whole life in Scotland to be scared of the rain,” points out David, a retired general practitioner from a small town near Glasgow, and the second of the twelve characters through whose eyes we see the day unfold-episodically but chronologically, from early morning to nighttime.
It is set on the banks of a large loch in the Trossachs National Park, just north of Glasgow, and follows the events of a single day, during which the rain pours down unremittingly-“the sounds of the water on leaves and bark, on roofs and stones, windows and cars, become as constant as the sounds of blood and air in your own body”-spoiling a group of English and Scottish holidaymakers’ fun.
It’s only fitting that the literature of the British Isles-what Hilary Mantel has Cromwell describe as that “miserable rainy island at the edge of the world”-is awash with cascading rivulets of rain, and Summerwater, Sarah Moss’s seventh novel, is no exception. Bathsheba’s ill-fated marriage to the caddish Sergeant Troy in Far from the Madding Crowd is met with a violent cloudburst of “liquid spines.” A mizzling, persistent damp leaches through the mud-splashed pages of Wolf Hall. In Bleak House the solemn “drip, drip, drip” of the Lincolnshire rain keeps time with the regularity of a metronome. Lear stands on the heath railing, drenched by a deluge.
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