Tag: Margaret Atwood

The Year of the Flood (2009) by Margaret Atwood

13th September 2009 / / 5 Comments

The latest novel by Margaret Atwood takes us back to the world of 2003’s Oryx and Crake; though The Year of the Flood is not so much a sequel to it as a companion novel, taking place as it does in more or less the same timeframe. It’s not essential to have read the older book to comprehend the newer (though of course certain events carry more resonance if you have); and I’d say that, overall, The Year of the Flood is a better ‘way in’ to this world of Atwood’s. I would also say it is the better book of the two.

In the near-ish future, most of humanity has been wiped out by a plague. We focus on two survivors: Toby, who has sequestered herself away in a spa; and Ren, who was in quarantine when the plague hit, waiting on test results after being bitten by a client of the sex club where she worked. What the two women have in common is that both were members of God’s Gardeners, a nature-based cult whose philosophy fused science and theology (the book’s title refers to the ‘Waterless Flood’ which the cult believed would spell the end for humanity). The novel follows the lives of Toby and Ren through their time in God’s Gardeners and after, up to the fictional present, where they discover that they’re not alone.

The earliest time depicted in The Year of the Flood is still in the future from our vantage point, and it’s a future of powerful corporations, corrupt law-enforcement environmental pressures, and hybrid species created by genetic manipulation. Atwood brings to life the horror of living in this bleak world, perhaps most vividly early on, when she describes Toby’s attempts to survive after losing her parents: renting a room above a shop that trades illegally in endangered species, she first gets a job dressing up in animal-suits to advertise things; then she sells her hair; then her eggs (which leaves her sterile); before finally landing a job at SecretBurgers (where the secret is what kind of meat you’re eating.

It’s after an altercation in this job that Toby is taken under the wing of God’s Gardeners, and she becomes one of the cult’s teachers; Ren joins along with Lucerne, her mother, when Lucerne leaves her husband for her new lover, Zeb. The Year of the Flood is, for the most part, a portrait of the cult and the effect it has on the protagonists. The cult means well, but life within is not entirely rosy: some members are unable to adhere to the rules (for example, we see Zeb smuggling in meat, when God’s Gardeners are all supposed to stick to a vegetarian diet); and even the cult’s philosophy can be fluid if needs be (at one point, the leader, Adam One, talks of the need to present the cult’s theology in a way that will ‘push popular sentiment in a biosphere-friendly direction’; ‘God needs to be filtered’, as he puts it later). Furthermore, being in the cult affects the way its members deal with the world when they leave; for instance, after Lucerne quits and takes her daughter with her, Ren has to adjust to being in a ‘normal’ school, and the cult’s insistence on memorising everything leads her to mistrust the school’s methods: ‘it seemed so dangerous, all that permanent writing that your enemies could find’ – even touching the tools and products of writing leaves Ren feeling literally unclean.

This portrait of the cult and its world is, I would say, the main point of the novel: the characterisation is rather too patchy for the book truly to work as a character study (none of the characters really leaps off the page as a rounded individual); and the plot seems more or less to be just ‘life going on’ (even accounting for the Waterless Flood, which is not depicted in overly dramatic terms). This leaves us with the issues to be the primary focus of The Year of the Flood; and I find the book to be ambivalent about them.

On the one hand, the heart of the society Atwood depicts is clearly rotten; on the other, as noted, the cult is not presented in a highly positive light (and the sermons delivered by Adam One throughout the novel smack of increasing desperation as time goes on). Yet I don’t gain a clear sense that this ambivalence is really intentional. Be that as it may, these are the moments that represent for me The Year of the Flood’s key point: Toby listening to birdsong, imagining her knowledge of language being supplanted by this ‘ceaseless repetition, the song with no beginning and no end.’ And Ren telling us her motto: ‘We are what we wish. Because if you can’t wish, why bother?’ What matters, this seems to say, is the ability to imagine a changed life, and to work towards that vision. Perhaps the failing of God’s Gardeners is that they were ultimately not up to that task. Perhaps the Waterless Flood took away all chance of anyone doing that; then again, given the book’s ending, perhaps it didn’t.

Thoughts on Oryx and Crake (2003) by Margaret Atwood

12th September 2009 / / 0 Comments

Something has been niggling me about Oryx and Crake ever since I finished reading it. I’ve been trying to put my thoughts into a review; but, for whatever reason, can’t get them into a continuous piece of prose. Rather than continue to sit here, stumped, I have decided to write down my thoughts as they occur to me, and we’ll see how that goes.

First of all, here’s the plot summary I wrote:

Some time after the apocalypse, Snowman is the only human left alive — the only human of a kind we would recognise, anyway. The other inhabitants of this world are the Children of Crake, genetically-engineered humans who might as well be a different species, so alien are they physically and mentally. Crake — and Oryx — are god-like figures to these humans; Snowman says he was sent by Oryx and Crake, and now acts as a kind of messenger.

Of course, it’s all a pretence — Snowman’s way of surviving (or justifying his existence) in the transformed world. In the past (which is still in the future), ‘Snowman’ was named Jimmy; Crake was his friend Glenn, who grew up to be the geneticist who wanted to create a better kind of human. Oryx was a child prostitute who would become the teacher of the ‘Crakers’, as she called them. Oryx and Crake the novel chronicles how one world became another.

And here are my scattered thoughts:

  • There’s something over-familiar about the worlds of both strands of the novel. In the further-future, post-apocalyptic strand, there are real marks of strangeness (like a bioluminescent rabbit, and the Crakers themselves); but I don’t feel the true frisson of alienness that I would expect from this kind of setting. Perhaps it’s a consequence of seeing this world through the eyes of Snowman (which I appreciate is vital to the story Atwood is telling), who’s the closest the book has to ‘one of us’, and therefore a way in to the world that we wouldn’t otherwise have.
  • The nearer future — dominated by corporations, with living-spaces divided between the Compunds (where young JImmy lives) for the well-off, and the ‘pleeblands’ for everyone else — is better realised (just as well, as it’s where we spend most of the novel), but still has its shortcomings. An example of both sides: there’s a passage where Atwood describes how executions and suchlike have become a form of mass entertainment, and it comes across as pretty hackneyed to me. But then, immediately afterwards, the author puts in different terms: the culture of the body has taken over from that of the mind and soul. This, I think, is much more evocative and striking.
  • Making the ‘last man’ such an ordinary person as Jimmy/Snowman is interesting, and perhaps closer to how such a situation might play out in reality than making him an ‘expert’ (then again, who really knows?). I appreciate Atwood’s observation that the world has become static for Snowman — he can’t move on, because there’s nothing to move on to. Even at the end, the last chapter begins in the same way as the first, as though to suggest that nothing has really changed (though perhaps it has…). But I’m not sure that this feeling is really evoked through the prose.
  • When Oryx tells Jimmy about her past, he can’t understand why she’s so at ease with what happened to her (it’s because she feels it could have been much worse); this is mirrored by a rosy glow to the writing that contrasts most effectively with the grim nature of the events themselves. But I don’t think Atwood matches prose to effect quite as well as this in the rest of the book.
  • We don’t learn the nature of the catastrophe that befell the world until over halfway through Oryx and Crake — and it doesn’t matter so much even then, because it’s the ethics in which Atwood is most interested. And there are real dilemmas to think through here, most clearly embodied in the differing views of Crake and Jimmy/Snowman. For example (I may be skating over some philosophical questions here, but please indulge me): if you could remake humans so that they lost some of their negative attributes and became better adapted for survival, but in the process they lost some of their capacity for free thought — if they became less recognisable to us as ‘human’ — would that be the right thing to do? Atwood offers no firm answers.

I chose to read Oryx and Crake now as a prelude to reading The Year of the Flood (which I should be getting to next). I’m curious to see how the two will compare.

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