The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

Their stories are parables of survival, in which the simple desire to subsist means going with the system, even when the system is designed to grind them up. Jumping back and forth in time, Atwood evokes the women’s jagged journey to this grim end. Ren, a sex worker, ducks the damage in an isolation room at Scales and Tails, a strip club where she wound up working because it had good health and dental benefits. Toby waits out the plague in a former spa, where plastic surgery was to mask her identity from a sadistic rapist. Again, two survivors, Toby and Ren, form the crux of the tale.

“The Year of the Flood” chronicles the same story from a female point of view. Two characters, Jimmy the Snowman and Glenn, dominate the telling. The source of the holocaust was a pill called BlyssPluss, which didn’t cause happiness, but rather death. A new race of beings called the Crakes wanders a blasted moonscape, trying to decide whether it is worth rebooting the planet after it has been decimated by a brutally swift plague. That novel was the apocalypse done in dour tones and mythopoetic images, part Doris Lessing, part H.G. The tone here couldn’t be more different from that of “Oryx and Crake,” the 2003 Man Booker finalist that this book rewrites and retells.

She may be imagining a world in flames, but she’s doing it with a dark cackle. Stuffed with cornball hymns, genetic mutations worthy of Thomas Pynchon (such as the rakuunk, a combined skunk and raccoon) and a pharmaceutical company run amok, it reads like dystopia verging on satire. So it’s a welcome surprise that her new novel, “The Year of the Flood,” is a slap-happy romp through the end times. From 1972’s “Surfacing,” a virtuoso rewriting of the Demeter myth, to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” with its baroquely imagined future in which women are slaves, Atwood’s best books are dream capsules in which greed, destructive anti-environmentalism, religious fundamentalism and the constant desire to subject the will of women combine into a proto-fascist force.īecause Atwood thinks deeply on these matters, her vision is often bleak. But no novels, and it is in her novels that Margaret Atwood spins the most arresting alternate mythologies to our hell-bent world. Yes, there have been half a dozen books, an opera even. Lady Oracle has been quiet the last six years.

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood