REVIEW OF THE WEEK
The Sunday Age
Sunday October 11, 2009
THE YEAR OF THE FLOODMargaret AtwoodBloomsbury, $45You can always tell that global unease about the present has reached a certain pitch when mainstream authors start writing science fiction about the future. We can probably expect lots of global-warming inspired dystopias in the coming years; we're unlikely to see many as absorbing and darkly plausible as this one.In fairness, Margaret Atwood has distinguished form in "speculative fiction", as she likes to call it, including A Handmaid's Tale (1985) and her 2003 novel Oryx and Crake, to which The Year of the Flood serves as, if not a sequel, then a companion piece. Flood examines the Armageddon described in the earlier novel from the point of view of its survivors.It begins in the quietly devastated aftermath of a pandemic plague. Two women, Ren and Toby, have separately survived; Atwood gradually connects them and their stories through a series of rhythmic loops into the past that explain how they survived not just this final catastrophe, but the savage society that spawned it. Ren and Toby's stories are interleaved with hymns and sermons from God's Gardeners, an underground religious sect that gave both women refuge as the world descended into hell.Atwood uses Ren and Toby to reel us in, but it's the nature of their fallen world that is most immediately striking. Government has disappeared, order exists only in enclaves controlled by all-powerful and secretive "corps". Elsewhere technology and social breakdown has made life in the nameless city brutal, corrupt, sadistic, anonymous. People eat "Secretburgers" and try not to imagine what's in them; any surplus protein, including discarded human corpses, is recycled into the "garboil" that fuels cars. Sex is mere product. Ren, indeed, works as a stripper at a sex club, and is grateful for the chance. The scientists who unleash the pandemic plague upon the world insert it into "BlyssPluss", a pill designed "to solve every known problem connected with sex".Some of Atwood's sci-fi conceits are grimly enjoyable. One corp, CryoJeenyus, freezes customers' heads when they die "in case someone in the future invented a way to regrow a body onto your neck".This future is a bleak place. And with its eviscerations and its brutal rapes and a plague that liquefies human beings, The Year of the Flood is a violent book. Atwood doesn't wallow in the ghastliness, though: the degraded nature of this future is just as vividly evoked through subtle touches such as barbaric brand spelling (the "AnooYoo" beauty spa; "Seksmart"; "HelthWyzer") and the way people talk. Ren recalls that when her one-time classmate Glenn, aka Crake, was working on the science of immortality at Rejoov Corp, he'd say "Use your meat computer" when he meant "Use your mind", a turn of phrase that sounds about right for the nerdy loner who will go on to bioengineer the apocalypse.Of course, good End Times fantasies like this one offer certain queasy pleasures. There's the solipsistic dream of being the Last Man or Woman; the obliteration, with society, of everything irritating in it; and the thrum of existential dread. Atwood keeps her characters expertly menaced: they're hunted by sadistic criminals; they're constantly at risk of being devoured by super-smart "spliced" pigs with human DNA in their brains or the vicious dogs ("Watson-Crick splices") bred to guard corporate facilities, and thus becoming, as the Gardeners bravely put it, "part of God's great dance of proteins".It's a measure of Atwood's skill that the book's deep question €” what of value will survive of us, other than our (rapidly liquefying) human meat? €” is continually posed by the more specific question of whether Ren, Toby and the Gardeners will survive. The ending, however, which suggests ambiguously hopeful answers to both questions, is not entirely successful. Returning as it does to the new species of human created in Oryx and Crake €” whose features include blue penises that wag like dogs' tails, seasonal group mating and an immunity to romantic pain €” it also verges on the merely bizarre.But it's a minor flaw in an inspired work. Flood's most memorable triumph is its portrayal of God's Gardeners. The Gardeners start out sounding like a vegan prayer group with millenarian fantasies. But as the human end-game approaches, their faith seems increasingly sane. Like the ingenious organic horticulture they practise on slum roofs, their religion evolves into a practical worship of life itself, and a solace even for agnostics like Ren and Toby. The fate of the Gardeners, who comfort themselves with the thought that "in the eye of God, not a single atom that has ever existed is truly lost", is the most affecting part of the whole gruelling tale.There is, inevitably, a loud cautionary note in Flood. The dangers of ecological ruin and blind science haunt this parable pretty much undisguised. But Atwood is too artful a writer to preach; she leaves it to the Gardeners to draw the conclusions. "Other religions have taught that this World is to be rolled up like a scroll and burnt to nothingness, and that a new Heaven and a new Earth will then appear," says Adam One, the Gardeners' founder. "But why would God give us another Earth when we have mistreated this one so badly?"
© 2009 The Sunday Age