Review: The Year of the Flood

Thank God for Margaret Atwood's new book The Year of the Flood.  Without it I surely would have gone completely insane on a recent, extremely frustrating, 10-hours-of-driving-in-one-day road trip to Chatham.

In my opinion, Atwood's books have it all:  they are very well-written, extremely intelligent, AND you can't put them down because you're dying to know what comes next.  Not in the Dan Brown whodunnit kind of way, but in a "wow, I really care about this character and want to find out what happens to her" kind of way.  I have studied Atwood's novel Alias Grace three times in my life (in high school, undergrad, and grad school), and happily read it in its entirety each time.  This is saying a lot considering I usually had about a million other things to read in university.

The Year of the Flood just might be my favourite of her novels.  It is set in the same world as Oryx and Crake, but centres around the religious/environmental cult God's Gardeners, and what happens to them before and after the "Waterless Flood" - literally a deadly virus that wipes out most of the human population.  The novel focuses on two Gardeners, Toby and Ren.  Following the flood, they appear to be the only human survivors; as the story unfolds, however, they realize they're not as alone as they thought they were.

I read somewhere that Atwood resists the term "science fiction" being applied to her novels that otherwise appear to fall into that category.  She feels (to paraphrase) that events which occur in these books could conceivably occur in today's world, if they have not already happened.  Bearing in mind this idea while reading TYOTF leads to a rather disturbing literary experience.  In the novel, the rampant exploitation of the earth's resources has led to a (pre-flood) world controlled by the tellingly named CorpSeCorps, an apparent amalgamation of military forces and pharmaceutical companies.  Cities are divided between "compounds" and "pleebs", which bear unsettling resemblances to suburbs and slums.  A popular fast food chain is called Secret Burger, as the kind of meat served is kept secret from the patrons (McDonald's, people - All Beef is only the name of the company that makes the burgers).  The epidemic that wipes out the population is the last of a long line of less severe viral outbreaks for which CorpSeCorps has in the past produced vaccines (Swine, anyone?).

Scary?  Yes, but this is still the best book I've read in a long time.  Read it.  You won't regret it.