Doomsday, Part Two
Atwood goes back to the future with The Year of the Flood
Even Margaret Atwood’s rabidly devoted fans were frustrated by the cliffhanger ending of 2003’s Oryx and Crake. On the last page, Snowman, apparently the last human on earth, discovers two men and a woman in a clearing and must decide whether to kill them or embrace them. In her signature sly style, Atwood ends the book before he chooses. Now we get to find out what happened, sort of: The Year of the Flood returns to the plague-obliterated landscape of the earlier novel with a parallel narrative about a fundamentalist granola group dedicated to preserving plant and animal life as humanity dies out. The story’s heroines—an acrobat-prostitute and a rifle-toting spa herbalist—struggle to free themselves from the corporations, sexual exploitation and violence that rule society. Atwood’s future is dark, even gory (in a nod to Soylent Green, people are addicted to burgers made from human flesh), and imagines present-day economic and technological developments pushed to their most extreme conclusions. It’s also one of Atwood’s funniest books, deriving much of its sinister whimsy from the merging of religion and science (Saint David Suzuki pops up in one of many sermons), and from such plausible inventions as pigs with human brain tissue. Sept. 8.
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