Celebrated author and poet Margaret Atwood has written superbly for so long that readers may forget how deeply her talent runs. Within a few pages, her new novel, The Year of the Flood (2009, Bloomsbury, London, 433 pages), about a “Waterless Flood” that kills almost everyone, reminds them.
Sixty-nine-year-old Atwood, a past Booker Prize winner, precisely describes a future full of harassed humans, hazardous cities, immoral companies and gene-spliced creatures. She envisions not-quite-vegetarian lion-lamb mixes, multi-colored “Mo-Hair” sheep and precocious pigs with human-brain tissue.
Happily, The Year of the Flood is fiction, Atwood says, but its general tendencies and many details are “alarmingly close to fact”. So “The local pleebmobs paid the CoprSeCorpsMen to turn a blind eye. In return the CorpSeCorps let the pleebmobs run the low-level kidnappings and assassinations, the skunkweed gro-ops, the crack labs and street-drug retailing, the plank shops that were their stock-in-trade. They also ran corpse disposals, harvesting organs for transplant, and then running the gutted carcasses through the SecretBurgers grinders.... During the glory days of Secret-Burgers, there were very few bodies found in vacant lots.”
In the notorious Painball prison, paintball-gunning inmates track and kill each other in a fenced forest where the trees and rocks hide cameras. “Often there wasn't much to see, except a leg or an arm or a blurry shadow, because the Painballers were understandably stealthy. But once in a while there'd be a hit, right on screen.”
Elsewhere, religious visionary Adam One leads the God's Gardeners, a cult keen to save animals and the environment. They worship saints with familiar names, including former U.S. vice-president Al Gore, cancer-stricken cross-Canada runner Terry Fox, environmental scientist and documentary-maker David Suzuki and mountain-gorillas defender Dian Fossey.
Unexpectedly, the Gardeners' horrific prophecy, a Waterless Flood (deadly plague), happens. “This was not an ordinary pandemic: it wouldn't be contained after a few hundred thousand deaths, then obliterated with biotools and bleach.... It traveled through the air as if on wings, it burned through cities like fire, spreading germ-ridden mobs, terror, and butchery. The lights were going out everywhere, the news was sporadic: systems were failing as their keepers died.”
Separately, former cult members Toby and Ren survive. Toby had barricaded herself in the AnooYoo Spa. Ren was quarantined in “the Sticky Zone” at the Scales and Tails nightclub-brothel.
The story unfolds on four tracks with Toby and Ren each narrating before and after the “flood”. How many other people remain alive? Will Toby and Ren reunite? Did most humans deserve to die? Does life retain its value amid such destruction?
“There was a lot of trash cluttering the streets – burnt things, broken things. Not only cars and trucks. Glass – a lot of that. Shackie said we had to be careful which buildings we went into: they'd been right near one when it collapsed. We should stay away from the tall ones because the fires could have eaten away at them, and if the glass windows fell on you, goodbye head. It would be safer in a forest than in a city now. Which was the reverse of what people used to think.”
An accomplished poet, Atwood presents poetic songs, like “My Body Is My Earthly Ark”, “God Gave Unto the Animals” and “The Earth Forgives”, from The God’s Gardeners Oral Hymnbook. The lyrics may be tough to imagine singing, but ditto for most religious songs.
Well written and gripping, The Year of the Flood disappoints with a weak finish. Rather than ending conclusively, Atwood lets the story fizzle out.
For decades, the prolific Atwood, with dozens of fiction, poetry and essay titles to her credit, has been Canada's greatest living writer. The best of her past novels include: The Handmaid's Tale (1985), Cat's Eye (1988), Alias Grace (1996) and The Blind Assassin (2000). She lives in Toronto.
Approval rating: 77 per cent.
For more information: www.bloomsbury.com/theyearoftheflood
(October 11, 2009)
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