Inside the house, maids pin up their skirts and try to make breakfast while wading red-legged through the water, laughing and screeching. Beginning mid-flood, with ducks swimming through Grandma Willoweed’s drawing room windows “quacking their approval,” Comyns’s narrator quickly moves on to “ passing pig squealing, its short legs madly beating the water and tearing at its throat, which was red and bleeding,” and then the sun comes “out bright and strong and everywhere became silver.” That last fact is a good thing if you side with one of the book’s several astonished children, but bad if you’re Old Ives the handyman, superstitiously convinced that the sun will draw the moisture back into the sky. In fact, the book turned out to be a great deal more than that: it was downright astonishing. I knew nothing about Comyns at the time: I picked up the novel exclusively because of the title, which struck me as promising and intriguing. Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead was the first book I read by British novelist Barbara Comyns.
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