The Year of the Flood [Audiobook] [Unabridged] (Audio CD)

Margaret Atwood’s vision of an environmentally blighted, plague-ridden, genetically altered future has had more than five years to broaden and sharpen since the 2003 publication of her dystopian novel Oryx and Crake, but readers can rest assured that nothing in that vision has mellowed in the interim. The Year of the Flood expands on Oryx and Crake’s storylines and characters, and yes, the future is still very bleak, though not entirely without hope. The Year of the Flood is less a sequel to Oryx and Crake than a retelling of that novel’s central events from two radically different viewpoints. The new novel begins like its predecessor, with a survivor of the Waterless Flood – a laboratory-made pandemic that has wiped out almost all of the human race – pondering the ruins of Western civilization. The story this time centres on Toby, a former therapist at a high-end spa that specialized in making rich women look a little younger for a little while. She was also once a secret member of God’s Gardeners, an extreme eco-cult led by the enigmatic Adam One, whose patchwork gospel combined elements of pacifism, veganism, Christian and Jewish Gnosticism, deep ecology, and a bizarre hybrid of Creationism and Darwinism. Pledged to restoring and preserving God’s creation, the Gardeners set up a series of successful organic gardens and compounds on the roofs of abandoned buildings in the pleeblands, the urban ghettoes that housed the majority of the population. How Toby arrived at and eventually left the Gardeners’ urban Eden to shill for a corporate spa forms much of the novel’s back story. With the world nearly at an end, Toby is left with plenty of time to ponder the past as she watches the mutant pigs that have escaped from an experimental farm ravage her garden. The other survivor is Ren, an exotic dancer who had the good fortune of being trapped in a quarantine room when the pandemic hit (she’d been touched by a client possibly carrying a venereal disease). Ren grew up with God’s Gardeners but was forced to leave the group when her mother broke up with one of the Adams and moved back to a corporate compound to be with Ren’s biological father. Ren is safe so long as the power doesn’t die or the food doesn’t run out, so she passes her days, like Toby, reflecting on her time with the Gardeners (where Toby was her teacher) and the series of catastrophes that culminated in the Waterless Flood. Oryx and Crake placed readers in the antiseptic belly of the technocratic beast, its central characters – Oryx, Crake, and Snowman – having full access to the corporate labs where mildly autistic computer nerds rewrote DNA codes, dreamed up new, improved life forms, and idled away their off hours playing video games and downloading highly specialized porn. Atwood has taken a different tack in The Year of the Flood, choosing two protagonists who inhabit that same society’s radical fringes, a narrative strategy that produces some mixed but mostly compelling results. What readers see more of in The Year of the Flood are the desperate endgames played out by the millions of pleeblanders who have failed to secure a position within one of the several corporations that effectively run the world. All services, including the security forces, are privatized and interconnected, and Atwood is unsparing in dramatizing the human costs of a for-profit-only society. Critics of the corporate power structures are regularly butchered and harvested for organs, their deaths sanitized in the media, and women who want something better than a job slinging protein burgers at the local SecretBurgers had better be ready to sell their, er, assets, on the open market. Oryx and Crake explored this nightmarish consumer world from the buyer’s perspective; The Year of the Flood is about the lives up for sale, making for some uncomfortably intimate reading. The novel’s flashback structure and Atwood’s choice of protagonists dampens some of that intimacy and drama. Too much of the back story is peripheral to the novel’s dominant themes. The extended flashbacks to the Gardeners’ compound tend to read like a record of a typical 1960s commune, with alpha-male types battling for ideological and sexual dominance and disillusioned New Age matrons doing most of the heavy lifting. More problematic is that Toby and Ren are, for the most part, emotionally and spiritually disengaged from the Gardeners’ ideological enthusiasms. Though different in age and temperament, both are inclined to skepticism, self-analysis, and self-absorption, which means that neither of them actually does much. The flashback structure also tends to value reflection and analysis over action, which makes for an imbalance of too much commentary and not enough suspense. The novel’s second half, however, combines the best of Atwood’s dystopian vision and wry commentary with a compelling story arc that eventually returns readers to the enigmatic ending of Oryx and Crake. Without giving anything away, let it be said that readers will finally learn the identities of the three human strangers Snowman stumbles upon, and that their meeting is not as bleak as you might think. --Ce texte provient de la Hardcover édition.

"A gripping and visceral book that showcases the pure storytelling talents she displayed with such verve in her 2000 novel, The Blind Assassin."
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Atwood is funny and clever, such a good writer and real thinker.... As ever with Atwood, it is friendship between women that is noted and celebrated - friendship not without its jealousies but friendship that survives rivalry and disappointment, and has a generosity that at the end of the novel allows for hope.... We don't know how [human nature] will evolve, or if we will evolve at all. The Year of the Flood isn't prophecy, but it is eerily plausible."
—Jeanette Winterson, The New York Time Book Review

"Canada's greatest living novelist undoubtedly knows how to tell a gripping story, as fans of The Blind Assassin and A Handmaid's Tale already know. But here there's a serious message too: Look at what we're doing right now to our world, to nature, to ourselves. If this goes on..."
—The Washington Post

"One of the versatile Atwood's authorial calling cards, as far back as her early novel The Handmaid's Tale, has been that of ruthless investigator, never hesitating to cut to bone in describing real-as-life dystopias. In this work, however, she also appears to be having wild fun, gunning it like a daredevil race-car driver: The Year of the Flood serves as an old-fashioned alarm (moral, ecological), a zombie thriller and a series of swashbuckling pokes at modern institutions.... To Atwood's supreme credit, her story is enthralling.... Memorable characters, a tightly controlled pace and shockingly plausible scenes make it fly - to a mysterious, skin-prickling ending. If Atwood also inspires ways to prevent such a gruesomely likely future, we'll owe her far more than literary admiration."
—San Francisco Chronicle

"Atwood unflinchingly holds aloft the sanctity of life - for all species - and the human quest for love."
—Chicago Sun-Times

"The Year of the Flood is timely and gripping.... Atwood creates a totally believable futuristic world in which people, for the most part, are the beasts. Those who have retained their humanity are the outlaws. But no matter what the setting, Atwood just tells a good story, one filled with suspense and even levity."
—USA Today

"Atwood scores a 10 when it comes to creating, from the stragglers of the old one, a whole new world.... Toby, Ren, and their lost-soul friend Amanda, would be sympathetic characters in any setting. That Atwood conjures them into this madcap setting, where vultures open 'like black umbrellas,' misdeeds are punished by kidney removal, and bracelets are made of jellyfish, makes us love them even more."
—Philadelphia Inquirer

"The Year of the Flood consistently does what one expects of any work by Margaret Atwood: It entertains, spins out suspense and rewards a reader's basic impulse, all the while subtly and expertly maintaining its literary respectability."
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

"[The Year of the Flood] shows the Nobel Prize-worthy Atwood … at the pinnacle of her prodigious creative powers. Her weigh-in on the breakdown of the social covenant comes during a time of historic global change that her story eerily both mirrors and foretells."
—Elle Magazine

"There is gallows humor, and then there is Margaret Atwood. The masterful Canadian writer is emerging as literature's queen of the apocalypse. And the dark visions Atwood again summons in The Year of the Flood prove quite illuminating."
—Associated Press

"Profoundly imagined. . . . This is a gutsy and expansive novel, rich with ideas and conceits."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Atwood orchestrates her narratives into a heart-pounding, mysterious and surprisingly touching finale. She enchants us so convincingly that after her spell is over, the 'real' world seems temporarily transformed. The Year of the Flood is both a warning and a gift."
—NPR.org

"Flood's relentlessly fabulous inventions and despondent predictions become almost unbearable, especially told in such gorgeously trenchant prose. In this way, the book recalls Atwood's 1985 masterpiece, The Handmaid's Tale."
—TimeOut New York (five stars)

"Atwood's latest is a fiercely imagined tale of suffering that rivals Job's.... As dark as Atwood's vision may be, the bonds among her women giver he work a bittersweet power."
—People

"Prodigiously imaginative and outrageously funny."
—The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

"This is a work that amuses, informs, enlightens and, remarkably, also challenges its readers to be better persons."
—San Antonio Express-News
"Atwood's mischievous, suspenseful, and sagacious dystopian novel follows the trajectory of current environmental debacles to a shattering possible conclusion with passionate concern and arch humor."
—Booklist, starred review
 
"Iconic Canadian author Margaret Atwood has once again written about a distressingly near future in which mass murder may be the best way to save the world."
—Ms. Magazine
 
"Another stimulating dystopia from this always-provocative author, whose complex, deeply involving characters inhabit a bizarre yet frighteningly believable future."
—Kirkus Reviews
 
Praise for Oryx and Crake:
 
"Oyrx and Crake is a cautionary tale about humanity swept downriver on a raft."
—Mel Gussow, New York Times
 
"The novel's tantalizing questions will have readers turning the pages of this extraordinary book as fast as humanly possible. . . . Like Orwell and Huxley before her, Atwood takes the world as we know it and suggests scenarios both frightening and all-too-probable . . .
"Brilliant, provocative, sumptuous and downright terrifying, Oryx and Crake is a sharp-edged down-and-dirty page-turner with a deftly wrought message in Atwood's smart electric language."
—Victoria Brownworth, Baltimore Sun
 
"A dystopian novel is not intended as a literal forecast, or even necessarily as a logical extension of our current world. It is simply, and not so simply, a bad dream of our present time, an exquisitely designed horror show in which things are changed from what we do know to a dream version of what we don't. . . . Atwood does Orwell one better . . . A "towering and intrepid new novel."
—Lorrie Moore, The New Yorker
 
"A landmark work of speculative fiction, comparable to A Clockwork Orange, Brave New World, and We. Atwood has surpassed herself."
—Kirkus Reviews
 
"Chesterton once wrote of the 'thousand romances that lie secreted in The Origin of Species.' Atwood has extracted one of the most hair-raising of them, and one of the most brilliant. . . . A potential dystopian classic."
—Publishers Weekly


From the Hardcover edition.