The Year of the Flood – Margaret Atwood (2009)

“What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.”

As I succumbed to some kind of (now possibly viral) chesty bug, the second book of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy kept me wonderful company. A slightly chunkier book than I often read (this isn’t altogether intentional I just seem drawn to shorter books) The Year of the Flood was such a wonderfully intelligent, imaginative read, that it really did become hard to put down.

The narrative of this book runs parallel to that of Oryx and Crake – in year twenty-five, a catastrophic event has effectively wiped out the vast majority of the population on earth. Strange, savage hybrid creatures wander the desolate landscape as an unforgiving sun beats down on the few fragile human beings left, and vultures hover overhead. Who, if anyone, is left alive?

“Why can’t I believe? she asked the darkness.
Behind her eyelids she saw an animal. It was golden colour, with gentle green eyes and canine teeth, and curly wool instead of fur. It opened its mouth, but it did not speak. Instead, it yawned.
It gazed at her. She gazed at it. “You are the effect of a carefully calibrated blend of plant toxins,” she told it.
Then she fell asleep.”

As with Oryx and Crake, the narrative moves back and forth between the last decade or so before year twenty-five, to the days and weeks following the man-made plague that wiped out most of the human population. In Oryx and Crake, we met Snowman (aka Jimmy), and the strange children of Crake – but by the end of that book we know that Snowman isn’t alone after all.

Surviving the “waterless flood” are two women Toby and Ren. Against the odds the two women survive separately, each isolated and alone. Ren living, at first, in an airtight room at the upmarket sex club where she had worked as a dancer, using the media devices she has access to, to search for news of her friend Amanda. Toby, at the Spa where she had been hiding out. Now Toby; some years older than Ren, watches from the roof top garden that was her home for several years.

In the years before, Toby had found refuge with the God’s Gardeners, a religious cult, who refuse to eat flesh and utilise the products of the natural world in their clothing, medicines and food. Toby has spent years hiding from a violent, stalker, and with the gardeners she finds a way of life she only partly believes in, but for some years brings her peace. Toby had become a bee keeper, maker of potions and in time became a key member of the community. Now she scans the horizon from the ruined rooftop garden, clutching a rifle she has dug up from her parents’ old home.

“Yet each flower, each twig, each pebble, shines as though illuminated from within, as once before, on her first day in the Garden. It’s the stress, it’s the adrenaline, it’s a chemical effect: she knows this well enough. But why is it built in? she thinks. Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we’re about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy?”

In the past Ren had also lived with the gardeners, as a child she had been taken there when her mother left her father and took up with Zeb another key figure in the gardeners. Ren’s mother eventually takes them back to one of the privileged compounds, a sanitised world of scientific breakthroughs and man-made everything. Here, as a teenager Ren meets Jimmy, who breaks her heart, bitter and hurt, rejected by her selfish mother, Ren stumbles inexorably toward the sex industry.

Ren is brought up against other ragged survivors, many of whom are horribly dangerous, and one of whom is Toby’s old nemesis. Ren is tough, but she needs help. Ren and Toby come together, they will need all their strength and ingenuity to survive the hostile environment that they are now living in.

I must admit that Toby’s story was my favourite of the two, the life she lived with the gardeners, one I almost started to envy. She learns the way of plants and how to talk to bees – she’s a survivor and someone I would want on my side.

I don’t really want to say too much more about the plot of this one, but oh my what an imagination. Nothing is so far fetched that it isn’t immediately credible, although let’s hope not prophetic. Though Margaret Atwood has a talent I think for seeing where it is that humanity is going wrong and calling us out on it. She does so brilliantly here, and I can’t wait for book three.