The Year of the Flood

Atwood’s follow-up to 2003’s Oryx and Crake (though the first book isn’t required reading) begins in a post-apocalyptic future. A “waterless flood,” seemingly a plague caused by a genetically modified drug, has wiped out most of humanity. For nearly 400 pages, the story rewinds and imagines a world where power-mongering corporations rule and renegade cults such as the eco-religious God’s Gardeners exist in ghetto-like pockets. The world outside is a scary, dirty place filled with skeevy sex clubs, sheep bred with human hair that’s sold for wigs and fast-food joints secretly purveying human-meat burgers.

Despite the story’s science-fiction flavor (or as Atwood prefers, “speculative fiction”), the author’s world appears like a twisted, perhaps satirized, version of our own poisoned culture and environment. Cell-phone-toting teenage “pleebrats” hang out at Secretburgers, and the ladies seeking a pick-me-up visit AnooYoo Spa for a little nip and tuck.

Beyond the doom and gloom, though, it wouldn’t be an Atwood story without strong female characters. The loyalty among the leading women—Ren, Toby and Amanda—adds emotional weight to the story. Against all odds, they help each other survive. By the end of the book, we’re left with less a sense of resolution than a question of what’s next. Perhaps Atwood is inviting us to answer that question ourselves by taking action in real life—to shift our culture’s tide away from its pending self-destruction. Perhaps not. Either way, it’s rather terrifying.

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