The Year of the Flood

When I chose The Year of the Flood for my first review, I had no idea how difficult it would be to explain. While it is not a hard read, perse, it is difficult at first to get used to the flow of the narrative. I also wonder if I would understand things better if I had read Margaret Atwood's other post-apocalyptic book Oryx and Crake, which she wrote before this book. However, I have read that The Year of the Flood is really more of a "companion" to Oryx and Crake and less of a sequel. In any case, I am planning on reviewing Oryx and Crake on a later date.

The Year of the Flood begins in medias res with Toby, a former member of The Gardeners,who is standing atop the roof of a ruined spa in the wreckage of the "waterless flood." I hesitate to call The Gardeners a cult, although if they did exist they may be considered as such. In this not-so-distant future they are really more of a religious community that lives atop a roof and refuses to eat "anything with a face." The Gardener's religion is a pseudo-Christianity. The sermons of Adam One, their leader, appear in between chapters. His teachings attempt to reconcile modern Christianity with science.

Toby's story is told in third person through a series of flashbacks. It traces her life from her childhood several years before the "waterless flood" hit. Before the flood, the world was run by the CorpSeCorps corporation which seemed to control just about everything, from the malls to the pharmaceuticals and even to the sex industry. Atwood makes it perfectly clear that this corporation is evil, and you really can't blame her in this case. Toby's story explains how the Gardeners saved her from Blanco, her sex-crazed supervisor at SecretBurger ( called such because no one knows what meat has been used to make the patties) and how she left them to work at the Anyoo Spa, where she is stranded after the flood has hit. The "flood" is a plague that has wiped out most of the human race.

Ren is the other main character in Atwood's novel. Her story is told in first person, which gives it a more intimate feeling. At the beginning of the book Ren is a sex worker for Scales & Tales, a strip club/brothel run by CorpSeCorps. While locked in the "Sticky Zone," a place the girls go if their "biofilm body suits" have been damaged by a client, she tells the story of how she became a Gardener. Her mother ran off to join the group after she met Zeb, sort of the second-in-command of the Gardeners. Her mother eventually grows tired of Zeb and takes Ren back to the Compound, the apartments of the wealthy, to live with her father. Ren goes to college but her mother cuts her out of her life due to financial problems, which is how she ends up at Scales & Tales. I won't ruin the rest of the story for you, but suffice to say Ren and Tobi eventually meet again and begin a post-apocalyptic journey. Also, there are blue people.

The messages of this book are not original, but Atwood is such a good story teller that the book forces the reader to think more about them. Basically we are destroying our environment by polluting the air, pouring our garbage into the streets, and eating God's beloved animals. However, even the Gardeners seem to reconcile with the meat-eating idea when it is necessary for survival, of course. The other message seems to be that corporations = evil. No, perhaps that is too harsh. We just shouldn't let one corporation take over everything.

Overall, I found this book hard to put down. Even with its unusual narrative, the story has a nice flow to it. Atwood never lingers too long on a single idea or character, so the book never has time to get boring. However, this causes the reader to have to piece the character's personalities and motives together from the mere glimpses she gets. This is not necessarily a bad thing. I've never minded having to think while I read. I feel that by writing in this way Atwood treats her readers as intelligent people, which I always appreciate.

Another thing I like about this book (and which appears in some of Atwood's other books) is the dark humor that weaves itself into the characters and the story. It's almost as if we are to remember that this is a work of fiction, or perhaps that no matter how bad things get, we should never lose our sense of humor. Read this book if you like science fiction, or animals, or Margaret Atwood, or are simply looking for a slightly unusual plot that may even make you think

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Well, I hope you enjoyed my first review. Next week I will be reviewing Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer, the final book in the famous (infamous?) Twilight series.