The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The Year of the Flood is the second book in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam post-apocalyptic trilogy. Set parallel to the events of the first book Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood gives us a different cast of characters and perspectives on the events leading up to the ‘Waterless Flood’ that wipes out most of humanity. Where Oryx and Crake gives a masculine viewpoint of power and agency, showing us the lives of two boys growing up in the Corporately controlled compounds where the wealthy, employed, scientifically and financially useful people of this pre-apocalypse dystopian society retreat, this book shows us the entwined lives of two women caught in the anarchic world of the overpopulated, under policed and dangerous world of the “pleeblands” outside the protected compounds.
Oryx and Crake showed us a world where humanity has been all but destroyed and a new breed of engineered beings have been given room to flourish. It is a tightly woven masterpiece that takes different storylines and weaves them together to the inevitable ending that we saw from the very beginning. Scenes from the main character Jimmy’s life after the apocalypse as he watches over the genetically engineered Crakers are interwoven with his childhood and life before the end of the world where he meets the boy who will take on the name Crake. Jimmy’s relationships with Crake (and Oryx) are slowly revealed alongside the mythologies that the Crakers have been creating around them. We get to watch as the hopelessness and danger of the old world is revealed to us, the horrible human excesses of greed and lust build at the same time as the danger and immediate needs of Jimmy in the future.
Oryx and Crake tells us the story of the apocalypse. The Year of the Flood uses that story as the basis to get us invested in the lives of survivors who are not directly related to the cause of the ‘Flood’ as we are given a similarly masterful interweaving of characters and timelines that builds on each other and the knowledge we have from the first book to take us deeper into how the apocalypse happens.
The second book took me longer to get into than Oryx and Crake, the hook of the mystery “how did this disaster happen” had already been explained and I was able to predict from the past narrative structure that I would have to wait till the very end of the book to get the answer to “what happens after the last scene of book one”. But I think the larger problem was that I had an easier time associating with the more familiar viewpoint of Jimmy than with the female protagonists of book two. This was a problem with myself and once I was able to acknowledge it I was able to more firmly immerse myself in the story. I was hooked throughout by Atwood’s excellent writing, her ability to craft beautiful prose is a wonder to watch. But after the initial struggle to get into the story what kept my interest was the different perspectives: the pleebland slum life vs the wealthy corps compounds from book one, the environmentalist cult compared to the technocracy and the female perspective compared to the male.
In both books the characters are passive observers to the world gone to hell and to the clinical madness and intensity of Crake and the fiery anger of Zeb and the calm collected preparations of Adam One. Jimmy was used but always had options open to him. But Tobey and Ren, the main viewpoints of the Year of the Flood are dragged around by forces outside their control as they try to maintain a level of safety and identity. The viewpoints are whole and vibrant, motivated by past fears and present worries, broken people trying to make the best of the world they are in while being trapped in their own cycles of action and inaction.
There is, as in the first book a strong current of sexual abuse running through the story. In the first book Jimmy and Crake watch porn and fantasize about one of the victimized children, Jimmy casually uses women for sex and then discards them by refusing them emotional engagement. Oryx herself is almost entirely created from Jimmy and Crake’s fantasies to serve them. In the Year of the Flood sexual violence, rape and threat of death force Tobey to join the Gardener’s, and is implicit in Ren’s work as a exotic dancer. This more refined level of sexual threat and danger is then washed away by the flood and the surviving women face the prospect of navigating a more brutal world where physically stronger men hunt them for entertainment.
Notable amount of detail and energy in this book goes into the doctrines and teachings of the environmentalist cult that Tobey and Ren find themselves involved in. The God’s Gardeners are a strange collection of transcendental thought, buddhist and christian theology and postmodern environmentalism. From the way they are treated in the story I am not sure if they are supposed to be respected or ridiculed. But they are certainly interesting.
It might be easy to discount this novel as a weaker entry than Oryx and Crake with its more passive actors, the lack of mystery and involvement in the actions that caused the apocalypse. To discount it for these things however would be to miss the power it has in showing the underside of this world. We see other perspectives that make us rethink things we have already seen: we are shown Jimmy’s misuse of women from the perspective of several of his girlfriends, we are shown a more respectful take on Amanda’s art and the God’s Gardeners than Jimmy’s narrow-minded dismissal. The marginalized voices once drowned in the noise of power and money can be heard after the old structures of the world are washed away.