The Drowned World

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1962

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-6

Chapters 7-11

Chapters 12-15

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1 Summary: “On the Beach at the Ritz”

A biologist named Dr. Robert Kerans watches the sunrise from a hotel balcony. Once again, he expects, the day will be unbearably hot. Kerans usually wakes up well before sunrise so that he can travel to the testing station before the day becomes “intolerable” (17). Because the hotel is air conditioned, he does not want to leave. He delays his departure until a patrol boat passes the hotel. He expects to see Colonel Riggs on this boat, with whom he might share a conversation, though Riggs is apparently delayed. Instead, Kerans watches the thermal storms and small tornadoes that increase in number as the day becomes warmer. Kerans tells himself that the storms are the reason he did not go to the testing station, but he knows that his job is largely irrelevant. Very few people read his scientific reports, and everything is progressing exactly as “anticipated twenty years earlier” (19).

Colonel Riggs and his team will finish their survey at the end of the month. Then, they will travel north and transport the testing station with them. Kerans is one of the last guests in the Ritz hotel. He struggles to accept that, very soon, the hotel and the entire city will be swallowed by the rising sea. The hotel is decorated lavishly, though it is imbued with the melancholy of “these last vestiges of a level of civilization now virtually vanished forever” (20). The lowest floors of the hotel are already underwater, causing structural damage that will soon spread. In the dawn light, watching the giant predatory mosquitoes, Kerans notes that the world resembles a conflation of the distant past and the present 20th century.

Though Kerans is only 40, his beard has turned white due to the radio-fluorine in the water supply. He seems “more relaxed and equable” than at any other time in his life (21). He prepares to leave the hotel as Colonel Riggs arrives in his landing craft, resembling “an old-time African explorer” (22). Riggs asks for Kerans’s help, requiring Kerans to abandon his scheduled work. Kerans is the team’s designated medical officer, as well as a research scientist. Many of the people they find require urgent medical assistance. Up close, the serene and peaceful lagoon that Kerans glimpsed from the balcony is a “garbage-filled swamp” (23). Kerans offers Riggs a drink in his hotel room. For the past six months, he has not spoken to anyone but Riggs and Sergeant Macready. This isolation is, he predicts, something that will soon affect the rest of humanity as the world undergoes “a major metamorphosis” brought about by climate change (25).

Riggs quizzes Kerans about the radio console in the hotel room. Kerans never listens to it, he says, as he already knows what will happen to the earth in the next 3 million years. Riggs reveals that, according to the news on the radio, they will soon leave this area for good. Due to rising water levels, all their work has been a total waste. Riggs jokes that Kerans would prefer to stay. Kerans becomes flustered by the idea that he will need to convince his fellow guest—a “complex” woman named Beatrice Dahl (27)—to leave the hotel. He worries that he will not be able to convince her before he leaves with Riggs. He sets off for the day on Riggs’s boat, with Riggs asking him how he sleeps so late these days.

Chapter 2 Summary: “The Coming of the Iguanas”

Aboard the catamaran, ducking under giant bats, Kerans watches a group of iguanas sitting on the window ledges of buildings that once housed offices and department stores. Riggs’s boat heads for the old center of the city as Kerans thinks about the magical nature of the drowned world. Despite their magic, he has never taken the time to identify which city he happens to be working in at any time. Dr. Alan Bodkin, his fellow biologist, lived in many different cities before the collapse of society. He is 25 years older than Kerans, and he conducts his research in the cities he remembers from his old life. Kerans has no memories of these cities, having been born and brought up in the Arctic Circle, so he is indifferent to the “sinking civilizations” (32). There are very few people left alive who remember a time before the cities were flooded.

The planet’s climate changed 60 or 70 years before the events of the book. Solar storms decimated the planet’s protection from solar radiation, causing a series of “gigantic geophysical upheavals” (32). The planet’s temperatures began to rise by several degrees each year. Soon, the tropical parts of the planet became unlivable. People migrated either north or south, with society gradually changing to adapt to these new, warmer conditions. The United Nations led the settlement of the north and south polar regions. Elsewhere, the planet’s biology changed rapidly. The polar ice caps melted, mammals became less fertile, and reptile and amphibian populations skyrocketed, as they were best equipped for the new aquatic conditions. Solar radiation boosted the rate of mutation and adaptation. By the time of Kerans’s birth, the human population of the planet had fallen to around 5 million, and far fewer children were born.

At the testing station, Riggs and Kerans find Beatrice in a “clean and discreet” bar beside an old but well-preserved swimming pool (36). She is laid out on a deck chair and, as Kerans notes, is pouting. Presumably, she has responded poorly to Riggs’s request that she evacuate. Kerans urges Beatrice to follow Riggs’s orders, with Riggs explaining to her the dangers of staying behind. He warns of rising temperatures, skin cancer, and “human scavengers driven northward” (38). Beatrice does not care. Riggs leaves her alone with Kerans, whom she is criticizing for trying to psychoanalyze her in front of Riggs. Beatrice invites Kerans to stay behind with her in the apartment that previously belonged to her grandfather. After her parents’ death, her grandfather raised her. Beatrice reveals that she has been suffering from “peculiar nightmares” (40). Kerans examines the Surrealist art collection amassed by Beatrice’s grandfather. If they do not go with Riggs, Kerans says, then they will not be able to evacuate. They will be stuck in London forever.

Chapters 1-2 Analysis

The opening line of The Drowned World lays out the situation faced by Kerans and humanity as a whole. The world is hot; soon, it will be “too hot” (17). Heat is the defining characteristic of this world, having changed the course of human history in a relatively short space of time. The day will soon be too hot for Kerans to remain outside, but the world itself may soon be too hot for humanity as a whole to survive. Heat has an overbearing, terminal effect on this world—no one can escape it for long. The sweat sticks to Kerans’s skin, and the buildings expand and contract in the heat. The characters rely on technology such as air conditioning to make their world habitable, but after the collapse of society, such technologies are precarious and unlikely to last. Every choice that the characters make in this world is made under the shadow of impending doom: Resources are running out, predatory animals are getting bigger and bolder, and the sun is getting hotter. The heat is reiterated constantly as a refrain, illustrating the pervasiveness and inescapability of the problem.

The heat is such a problem for humanity because they can do nothing about it. For Kerans, Bodkin, and Beatrice—the only people who have remained behind in the drowned city of London—it is tempting to view the sun as a distant, terrible god that is punishing humanity for some unknowable reason, but if the sun is a god, it is one with neither mind nor will. The language used to describe the sun often emphasizes this mindlessness: The sun is a “colossal fire-ball” in the sky, with “its reflection turning the dead leaden surface of the lagoon into a brilliant copper shield” (17). The dreadful worship of this mindless god evokes The Overlap Between Science and Mysticism. Both Kerans and Bodkin are scientists, but Kerans, by the opening of the novel, has come to regard his climatology as largely useless. Humanity cannot compete against, reason with, or fight back against the sun. They can putter about on their boats and carry out their research, but Kerans, Bodkin, Riggs, and everyone else are mired in a state of helplessness, and from within this helplessness, they regard the sun as an embodiment of the abyss—the end of mind and the triumph of mindlessness and nothingness. The same nihilism is represented in the eye of the iguana that both Kerans and Bodkin see in their dreams.

Notably, the narrative of The Drowned World begins after the collapse. It is an example of post-apocalyptic fiction, in which the crisis has already occurred, and the narrative is interested in how humans navigate this changed world. Each of the characters in the opening chapters demonstrates a different reaction. Riggs is committed to doing his job, leading his team of soldiers even though he suspects that the mission is futile. Beatrice refuses to cede in any way to the apocalypse, continuing to lead the lavish lifestyle that she inherited from her grandfather. Her only visible reaction to the apocalypse is a “slightly sullen pout” (37). Even amid this collapse, however, the characters find something resembling meaning in their lives. The exact nature of the relationship between Beatrice and Kerans is never described, though they share a romantic interest in one another. They are romantically involved, though they are not necessarily together. Their relationship gives their situation some purpose and serves as a means of Asserting Agency in the Face of Human Extinction: Kerans might feel that his research is meaningless, and Beatrice has nothing to do but read old magazines, but they spend time together as though trying to forcibly inject something interesting into their lives. Whether they actually like one another is almost incidental. They view it as gauche to openly discuss the end of the world. Instead, they feign politeness and continue to adhere to social etiquette, even as there is no society left to police said etiquette. These characters are pretending, for as long as they can, to be above the collapse of society—a position symbolized by their literal elevation above the London lagoon.

Beatrice is notable because she is the only person—at the beginning of the novel—who has chosen to be in the lagoon. Everyone else has been sent there on a mission. Bodkin is notable because he is significantly older than everyone else. His age means that, unlike Beatrice and Kerans, he remembers a time before the waters began to rise. Bodkin has endured the apocalypse, rather than being born into the society that exists in its aftermath. He has a personal connection to the city beneath them, while, to Kerans, the submerged London has no personal meaning. The jungle, the lagoon, and the iguanas are everything that Kerans has ever known, while Bodkin remembers the time before. If Beatrice is determined to perform the role of a rich person who lived before the apocalypse, Bodkin is the only figure who has the memories needed to judge her performance. He may not say much, but Bodkin has a finely tuned barometer for the changing conditions of the world because he is the only one who has truly witnessed the change in totality.