In a range of environmentally oriented international novels, future
cities in the Low Countries have been flooded, with Dutch populations
relocated to higher grounds or to floating cities. In contemporary Dutch
and Flemish fiction, however, reflections on cities by the water are
few and far between. More conspicuously, in the few literary novels that
imagine cities under threat from rising water levels, the cities in
question are not located on the shore but further inland, gesturing
towards other meanings and symbolical repercussions rather than towards
an engagement with flooding per se. This article examines two
contemporary flood novels: Roderik Six’s Vloed (“Flood”) and Renate Dorrestein’s Weerwater.
We approach the floods in these novels in terms of indeterminate
allegory, examining the contradictory meanings that can be attributed to
the radical upheavals recounted in these narratives.