In cold flood

THE YEAR OF THE FLOOD

By Margaret Atwood

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday

Available at National Book Store

At the heart of Margaret Atwood’s newest novel is a “waterless flood,” a manmade global pandemic that couldn’t be “obliterated with biotools and bleach.” Like an angel of death, “it traveled through the air as if on wings, it burned through cities like fire, spreading germ-ridden mobs, terror and butchery.”

Although this flood is dry, its vindictive, Biblical undertones evoke the torrential deluge of Noah’s day. As it spreads, the flood transforms the world from a harsh cacophony of busy machines and concrete monoliths into a barren landscape governed by “quietness, the absence of motors.” The virus causes its victims to explode in a reddish puree of blood and pulpy matter, like “ketchup,” as Peggy prefers to call it. Millions are now dead, and the technological infrastructures that ran our civilization are failing. The H1N1 flu looks like a scrawny wimp next to this viral behemoth. 

In The Year of the Flood, Atwood steeps readers in a severe world where a private security firm called CorpSeCorps ruthlessly lords it over the now-dead public sector. The world the corporation governs has been demoralized by unrepentant consumerism, catering to the wants of a race marked by “overpopulation and wickedness.” In defiance against natural order, they fiddle with genetics to concoct bizarre biological cocktails like rakunks, green rabbits, liobams, pigs with human brains, and “perfect” yet unfeeling naked humans with blue genitalia.

All is not lost, though. Amid the chaotic din, the corporation’s dissenters have clustered into deliberate communities to escape the excess and waste. The group central to the novel is the God’s Gardeners — a bunch of smelly, pacifist vegetarians who adhere to a quirky faith that combines science and religion. In their mission to preserve the ecosystem’s flora and fauna, they renounce the conventions and luxuries of modern life for homeopathic cures, itchy sackcloth outfits, and diets that revolve around a menu of soydines, beananas, mushrooms, odd legumes and weird, genetically spliced plants.

From the outside, the Gardeners are regarded as “twisted fanatics who combine food extremism with bad fashion sense and a puritanical attitude towards shopping,” but at least they are conscientious about their carbon footprint.

The Gardeners are led by Adam One, the kindly leader who teaches his followers “tolerance, and loving-kindness, and correct boundaries.” With other numbered Adams and Eves, he establishes a green haven where everyone contributes to the community by constructing “ararats” or storages for food and supplies in preparation for the flood. Although life here is initially hard, Adam eventually proselytizes those disillusioned by the outside world’s artifice into their honest and quasi-monastic ways. Two followers who join the Gardeners’ ranks are the heroines who tell their colorful tales of survival in this post-apocalypse.

Toby, the first heroine, currently holds base in a plush, organic health spa stocked with edible beauty creams and homegrown salad vegetables. Although her story begins in the sad and barren present, she traces back 25 years of flashbacks that chronicle the turn of events leading to the pandemic. Her mother died unknowingly from a series of medical experiments conducted by the drug company, HelthWyzer. Her father committed suicide shortly after, leaving her with nothing after he invested their savings in her mother’s medical bills. She leaves home and supports herself by taking denigrating jobs, such as working in a fast-food joint called Secret Burger — a seedy place purported to mix human parts into a nauseating salad of offal. After a violent scuffle with her boss, she unwittingly joined the God’s Gardeners upon Adam One’s intervention, later even becoming one of the group’s elders.

Another character who lives to tell about the flood is Ren, the daughter of a woman who runs away from her loaded, yet emotionally flat husband after falling in love with a handsome and muscular Gardener hunk. The Gardeners’ drab ways eventually grow on Ren, and she becomes tight buddies with the commune’s oddball kids. When her mother, Lucerne, is later disenchanted with the hunk and his sporadic sex, she flees the commune and takes Ren back to her father’s “normal” and desensitized medical compound. Lucerne sends her to school, and there she meets Jimmy the Snowman, the hero of Oryx and Crake. She dates him, they break up, and he dates her commune best friend Amanda Payne to churn out a nice dose of romantic angst. Both Toby and Ren eventually meet up during the flood’s aftermath, and together they must survive to restore the human race.

While Peggy Atwood is no stranger to these dystopian fantasies, The Year of the Flood is perhaps the most accomplished among her masterpieces such as The Handmaid’s Tale, which can sometimes grind on readers with her dyspeptic feminist agendas, and Oryx and Crake, which can read like it was written by a PETA activist on steroids.

In many ways, this vividly imaginative book picks up where the latter left off, not only resurrecting characters like Jimmy and Amanda, but also reviving a more panoramic version of its fallen Eden. However, the author’s writing now renders a much more fluid, personable, and satirically humorous narrative exquisitely focused on the interplay between her characters. While the Gardeners’ annoying hymns and their Calvinistic, ecological homilies first come off as tiring and repetitive, Atwood manages to tie in her moralistic visions gracefully without sounding like a tree-hugging bishop. 

In The Year of the Flood, Atwood has written a harrowing, albeit occasionally funny novel that urges us to be more conscious about living in communion with nature and humanity. However dark its outlook, this ultimately is a beautiful story telling of the human race’s qualities of resilience and redemption as we battle to preserve a world in peril.