The Year of the Flood
By Margaret Atwood
Hardback, Bloomsbury, pp. 448, ISBN 0747585164, Price: £18.99

Gordon Weetman

Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood’s last full-length novel, dealt with the consequences of accelerating technological progress. In a world where knowledge has overtaken morality, the effects of runaway genetic engineering wreak untold damage on the environment. The Year of the Flood returns us to this looking-glass future – an eerily plausible dystopia controlled by shadow Corporations, where laissez-faire capitalism is king and science is out of control.

Chicken nuggets are grown in research labs, while biologists feel free to indulge their craziest authorial whims. Raccoons spliced with skunks? Pig cells impregnated with baboon DNA? Sheep which grow human hair in rainbow colours? Why not, we might ask, when the barriers have been toppled that separate the created from the creator, the human from the divine?

The focus of Atwood’s satire has shifted in the six years since Oryx and Crake was published. In the early Noughties, the novel felt searingly of-the-minute: globalisation was in full pre-recession swing, and Dolly the sheep had just been cloned. The potential dangers of new technology provided science-fiction writers with a slew of compelling apocalyptic scenarios, but recently the sinister science of gene modification has been upstaged by the Damoclean sword of climate change.

The Year of the Flood centres round a group of hippyish religious eccentrics who call themselves God’s Gardeners. The Gardeners are eco-Christian pacifists who believe in love to all God’s creatures, and live in a close-knit community at odds with the “exfernal” world. Their philosophy is not always consistent: they are vegetarians, but not fanatical ones, and though they abhor commercialism, they are not above flogging cheaply-made ‘organic’ products to earn a little extra cash. For a fringe sect, they seem a surprisingly tolerant bunch.

The Gardeners’ live-and-let-live approach contrasts sharply with that of the Corporations, who use brutal Mafia-style violence to keep their extreme version of the consumer society in place. For years the Gardeners have been predicting the advent of something called the Waterless Flood, which will wipe the Corporations and their evil works from the face of the earth.

The Gardeners’ predictions are correct: Atwood’s novel opens just after this cataclysm has taken place. At first, the nature of the disaster is not entirely clear, but we soon work out that it’s some sort of fast-spreading disease – a real-life version of the theoretical pandemics that have filled the news recently. The effects of the Flood are stomach-churning. It causes those afflicted to melt into puddles of flesh, but the sickness only affects homo sapiens, which leads the Gardeners to view it as the antidote to the Fall of Man.

Atwood dedicates much of the novel to flashbacks detailing the events leading up to the Flood. Though The Year of the Flood is billed as a sequel to Oryx and Crake, the two books actually run concurrently. A large part of the new book’s appeal lies in the way it allows us to view the plot of the original from a different angle. However, The Year of the Flood depends too much on readers’ knowledge of its predecessor to generate suspense, and at times the whole thing starts to feel like an afterthought.

To me, Oryx and Crake felt fairly self-contained. It did not explicitly invite a follow-up; in fact, the apocalyptic ending seemed to deny the possibility of one. So why did Atwood write this novel? The need to ‘do something’ about global warming may have been a motivating factor. The Year of the Flood often feels like a handbook for green resistance, complete with a set of (admittedly tongue-in-cheek) Darwinian protest songs. Atwood even hired a composer to set some of the Gardeners ‘hymns’ to music.

Unfortunately, the desire to change the world is not a writer’s best starting-point. Atwood’s characterisation is simplistic – the Gardeners are virtuous in an uncomplicated, two-dimensional way – and her plot feels rather cobbled-together, especially towards the end of the novel. After all, what are the odds that six characters who have separately survived Armageddon would bump into one another through chance? Divine intervention aside, sometimes coincidence is just a euphemism for authorial laziness.

The prose itself is very readable, and Atwood has a lot of fun with the minor details of her invented world. The gangs that terrorize her slums are, predictably, divided along racial lines, but for some obscure reason their names derive from nouvelle cuisine food-fads (the Asian Fusions, the Blackened Redfish). Prostitutes wear all-over body condoms, and among the many artificial hybrid-species that now exist is an animal called the liobam, which was cloned by a Biblical extremist group. Atwood quips that this was “the only way to fulfil the lion/lamb friendship prophecy” without the first animal eating the second.

Given that most of humanity has been annihilated before the first page, the ending of The Year of the Flood is relatively optimistic. The final scene, in which the Flood survivors are gathered round a campfire, strikes an almost redemptive note. You might even speculate that this was the ‘real’ reason the book was written. Oryx and Crake was a bleak masterpiece that toyed with our human need to believe in salvation. Such needs grow more pressing with the years, and the author of The Year of the Flood is nearing her seventh decade. Though it’s comforting to believe that life will go on without us, you sense that in Atwood’s case this comfort, like the Gardeners’ idealism, is strongly influenced by wishful thinking. Not what we’ve come to expect from her at all.