The Year of the Flood (Hardcover)

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. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

“This is a gutsy and expansive novel, rich with ideas and conceits, but overall it’s more optimistic than Oryx & Crake. Its characters have a compassion and energy lacking in Jimmy, the wounded and floating lothario at the previous novel's center. Each novel can be enjoyed independently of the other, but what’s perhaps most impressive is the degree of connection between them. Together they form halves of a single epic…”
— Publisher's Weekly (starred review)

“The tremendous imaginative power of [Atwood’s] fiction allows us to believe that anything is possible.”
— New York Times Book Review

“Trust Margaret Atwood to put her finger on the pulse of the future….”
— Globe and Mail

“Atwood is a natural seer for an age that does not want to look too closely at what it condones, or refuses to see.”
— Glasgow Herald

“Margaret Atwood has outdone — and outsung — herself this time. The Year of the Flood is at once a solemn praise song to human hope and a dead-serious poke at our capacity for self-destruction. The novel shows the Nobel Prize-worthy Margaret Atwood at the pinnacle of her prodigious creative powers.”
— Elle Magazine