Their departure delayed, England’s last emigrants witness unusual sights from the cliffs at Dover.
In this installment, the stripped-down narrative of the previous two rejoins the original text atop the White Cliffs of Dover—where Mary Shelley pauses to perform feats of emotional projection. The singular pronoun retreats behind the plural, and the English Channel is enlisted as a proxy to express the derangements of a collective grief. Rare phenomena stand in for missing scenes between major characters. How do Adrian, Clara and Elvis react to the news that Idris has died? How does Lionel feel, having to tell them? The tempest and floods, the sonic boom, the subsiding tsunami show us instead.
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