Forbidden Flood Warning: The Bishop's Little Wet Dream

Not just fantasy, but a unique blend of 'clear-minded surrealism' and mischievous earthy satire, directed to achieve a powerful end...

Philip Goddard wrote five novels from 1990 to 1993, and Forbidden Flood Warning, the sixth and final novel was notionally half-written (early and later parts) in 1994, he then not being sure how to develop the intended major middle section. In 1995 he suddenly had other priorities, and so it came that the novel remained unfinished till he revisited it in 2015 to see if it would make a satisfactory short novel, with only a small amount of new writing to join the earlier and later sections and make an effective whole - and found that, from his perspective, it worked brilliantly and powerfully.

In the early 1990s he was gestating as a significant symphonic composer, and he approached his literary works as though they were music compositions, indeed all his novels and some of his short stories and poems actually being the literary equivalent of complex, organically structured symphonies, in which ideas, phrases and even individual words are treated like melodic motifs in such a symphony. At that time his particular model of symphonic organization and structuring was the late symphonies of Sibelius and especially the symphonies of the 20th Century Danish composer Vagn Holmboe - though Goddard's own musical symphonies, when they did come, were more diverse in approach.

Each of the novels defies standard (say, BISAC) categorization, overlapping equally with a number of categories - which means that labelling with any one of those categories would misrepresent the respective work.

Forbidden Flood Warning - A biting, acidly humorous surrealistic satire upon religious fanaticism

The new 'Noah', Edmund McFardle, is initially something of a national laughing stock, for he continues building his truly enormous ark on Scottish moorland at the top of Ballyhooly Hill (altitude some 200 metres) despite the decade-old drought. Nonetheless, McFardle isn't altogether alone in seeing the calamitous drought as one of God's signs of very different things to come. Throughout Britain all manner of religious sects are in one way or another seeking to convert those who are surviving the drought to their particular beliefs, supposedly to save them from the imminent end of the world and Day of Reckoning.

It is against this background that the gentle and affable Geronwy Bishop takes his annual holiday in Ballyhooly, soon finding himself the subject of an entertaining scandal and then gaining first-hand acquaintance of the legendary 'Noah'. He enjoys his stay so much that he returns the following year, by which time the rains have started and local flooding is becoming more and more of a problem.

One day during that holiday the heavens open more purposefully than hitherto and the flood waters rise to float the ark in some two hours as though through some miracle of God's wrath.

The true nature of the ark zealots' 'New Order of God' progressively reveals itself as something both absurd and most unwholesome, and ultimately self-defeating.

Caution - this work contains a few brief scenes that will shock the shockable!