The Year Of The Flood

This post first published May 19, 2011.

Author: Margaret Atwood
Published: 2008
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Series: MaddAdam #2
431 pages (hardcover)
 
After I finished reading this book, I was informed that it is a part of Atwood’s Oryx and Crake world. Something of a side-quel. And I was also informed that it really would be better if I had read Oryx and Crake first before The Year of the Flood. So now I feel kind of sad that I possibly cheated myself out of a better reading experience by reading this one first. I had no idea that this book was part of a series, since I think it did very well as a stand alone novel. Well, you can bet that I am definitely going to seek out Oryx and Crake now …

Anyway, from what I know, the events in The Year of the Flood kind of happen alongside Oryx and Crake, so it is not a sequel per se, but rather a different perspective of the story. In The Year of the Flood, the story has two main female narrators, Toby and Ren, and it is set in the far future. They both join the environmental religious group, God’s Gardeners, led by a man called Adam One. Toby is not a true believer of the faith, but was offered safety in their group from her boss/rapist, so she stays with the God’s Gardeners as a hard worker, and even rises in their ranks. Ren, who is only a kid really, is originally from a Compound (rich, elite) and she joins the God’s Gardeners because her mother Lucerne is infatuated with one of the Gardeners, Zeb. She leaves her husband and drags her daughter along behind her into the Gardeners’ circle.

The first half of the book mainly speaks of the events that happened pre-Flood: how the two joined the Gardeners, how they adapted (or coped) with the Gardeners’ way of living, how they got along with the group. The Gardeners are pacifists, anti-meat, and believe that nothing is truly garbage; everything can be reused. Because they take these beliefs to the extreme, Toby and Ren are kind of bewildered by it all at first. All the while, Adam One is preaching about the Waterless Flood that will cleanse the world of most humans so that a new Eden may grow. The latter half of the book are events that occur post-Flood, which consisted of how the survivors survived; their search for other survivors, their personal struggles. All the while I was reading the book, I couldn’t help but think that the world Atwood created was just so cruel and wicked that perhaps destroying it via a Waterless Flood was the only way to cleanse it.

I enjoyed this novel, especially the first three-fourths of it. Like I said, I never read Oryx and Crake, so for me, there was a bit of wonder in reading about this dystopic world, and curiosity to drive me along. The corporations, the technology and gene melding, and the desire to be more organic and natural are all things we are familiar with in our to world, but they are twisted to the extreme in this book. The book horrified me at times (in an oh-my-god kind of way), especially SecretBurgers, the restaurant/fast-food establishment that serves mystery meat burgers. And by mystery meat, I mean it could be anything; the characters have hinted it could be anything from an alley cat to mice to perhaps even people.

I really liked the characters, they were wonderfully realistic. It’s funny how even when the world is very different, and is possibly coming to an end, human beings still act like human beings. There are those who are greedy and selfish. Children still act like children. And there will still be love and friendship … which sounds kind of hopeful, yet somehow the book still paints a rather depressing picture of these emotions. This is a grim, grim book.

The ending of the book, perhaps the last sixty pages or so, were not as good in my opinion — just that I found it a bit sluggish, and I was no longer sure what direction the book was heading in at that point. From what I read online, apparently the ending is when The Year of the Flood really starts to tie in with Oryx and Crake — so perhaps since I never read O&C, that is why I wasn’t so interested in the ending. Still, I think this is a really good book, especially for lovers of dystopian fiction. It may be a bleak story, and it doesn’t exactly end off on a happy note (more of a cliffhanger, or a question mark, haha), but certainly worth reading.

My Rating: 4/5