Brenda's Book Bash

The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood (Nan A. Talese, 2009)

Let me start by saying that I have been an ardent Margaret Atwood fan since I was introduced to her work in the late 70s when Surfacing was all the rage at my Midwestern women’s college. There were plenty of tough-talking women publishing their work in those days, but many of them faded from the scene during the party girl 80s. Yet Margaret Atwood lives on, producing important books that also happen to be original, clever, compulsively readable, and continually surprising. I order her books months before their publication dates and read them straight out of the box, no matter what else I have going on when they finally arrive. But as advance praise and news of her proposed book tour started to appear before the publication of The Year of the Flood I found myself a bit skeptical about her newest addition to the growing body of “speculative fiction.” I think my worries had to do with the taking up of the same subject as her terrifying speculative novel, Oryx and Crake, a book that I have begged everyone who held any sort of opinion on our environmental future to read immediately.

Atwood’s first entry into the futuristic literature was The Handmaid’s Tale, and though the ground she covers there is very different, an important conflict in both of her previous futuristic novels involved class warfare. The Year of the Flood continues to tap the same indignities. In all three of the books she bills as “speculative fiction,” separation by class is one of the defining features of the future world. The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake both take place within the confines of the repressive, unexamined lives of the upper classes, and Atwood is a master at skewering the values (or lack thereof) and rituals of the so-called cultural elite. In The Handmaid’s Tale, there are brief forays into an underground world of sex workers, and some backstory about the war and the violent reorganization of the society, but most of the action takes place behind fortress walls. This is also true of Oryx and Crake. Jimmy grows up in a world controlled by the corporation (CorpSeCorps) his father works for and later sequesters himself in the Compound with his cohorts at the “Paradise Project.” The novel tackles huge questions, including what kind of rebellion is likely to come out of this social environment, and speculates on the effects of our current obsession with genetic technological advances. One aspect of the book that is most terrifying is the imposition of corporate values on scientific research. Many of the most highly touted projects are exercises in human vanity, like the attempt to create new, wrinkle-free skin rather than cures for diseases and to create through gene splicing more useful animals. As a matter of fact, it is the enforced separation from the Pleeblands coupled with the commodification of scientific research that creates the cynical young genius, Glenn (later known as Crake) whose genetically engineered new race is supposed to be a correction of all the aspects of human history he blames for the morally bereft landscape which he wipes out with his cleverly marketed virus. The book’s ending seemed to me at the time to be a master stroke, a delicately painted statement on humanity. One of the things I liked best about it is that it contained equal parts of despair and hope. We don’t know whose fire Jimmy sees burning on the beach, or what, perhaps, will be the long term effects of the Crakers “graven idol,” but we are instead asked to ponder what it means to be human at a most elemental level, something that our social order has made it impossible to feel.

So I was naggingly disturbed when I realized that The Year of the Flood was going to be not a sequel exactly (perish the thought) but a parallel version of the same events from a Pleeblands perspective. I wondered why she would want to do that. For one thing, she managed in Oryx and Crake to make the science fictional aspects completely believable, in part because she publicly announced and provided evidence on her web site that there was nothing in the book that was not already in use in the world of research and development, and partly because her invented technologies and creatures smacked of the values of our current scientific communities. I was also afraid she would spoil one of the most amusing parts of Oryx and Crake, which was the perception of the Pleeblands from the point of view of the corporate whores who were repulsed by and drawn to the tawdry and crass popular culture. I often felt while reading it that these sheltered people were out of touch, so I was curious to see how the portrayal of the “real world” would compare to the version set forth by the self-exiled CorpSeCorps Compound dwellers.

Several aspects of the book bothered me from the start. The focus on the fringe revolutionary group, God’s Gardener’s, includes a too generous sampling from their oral hymnbook, which, while entertainingly loony, takes up much more space than it needs to. The group, whose gospel preaches a return to Adam and Eve’s garden, features a naivete that is impossible to take seriously in the terrifyingly violent, filthy, and dangerous landscape. These Pleeblands are filled with dirty and derivative jokes—the disgusting fast food joint, SecretBurgers (which, like its pop culture predecessor, Soylent Green, is people!) and the sex club, Scales and Tails, where one of the main characters works. There is also a whiff of Mad Max and Roller Ball in the “Painballers,” criminals whose incarceration involves playing to the death in a video game-like landscape, most notably in the sexually predatory villain, Blanco, whose tattoo of a woman with her head stuck up his ass, while visually memorable, is so over the top that it becomes disturbingly humorous in an R. Crumb way.

And here is the heart of the problem, that while Oryx and Crake was both original and believable, The Year of the Flood is derivative and predictable, with an ending based on coincidences which would make a Hollywood screenwriter blush. This is not to say that the book doesn’t serve the cause, which, I tend to agree, is more important than literature at this moment in human history. But the concept was so much more terrifying in Oryx and Crake, partly because it was not written with such a heavy hand and it didn’t pander to a reading public whose indoctrination into popular culture is so complete that allusions to fast food joints and B movies will suffice where satire falls flat. I think we sense in Atwood almost as strong a distancing from the Pleeblands as we find in the CorpSeCorps compound.

My multiple misgivings about the whole cultural production were reinforced by the news of the book tour on her web site. This time around, she doesn’t just provide information and tips on green living. Her tour dates are announced with a description of an extravaganza which features a musical performance of the Gardener’s hymnbook while Atwood narrates. Some aspects of the performance sound appealing. I like the idea of people around the world taking part in entertainment that encourages them to consider the environmental ramifications of their lifestyles and behaviors. The tour touts its “green strategies” and encourages its audiences to measure their carbon footprint and makes available locally organically grown food. The web site touts all the energy saving measures taken during the tour, including the taking of “VegiVows, ” the serving of organic shade-grown coffee that is friendly to songbirds, the environmentally friendly packaging of the cd’s, and the use of natural cotton for the tee-shirts and tote bags they sell. Wait a minute—tee-shirts and tote bags? Et tu, Atwood?