Atwood's Flood

I recently finished Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood and was as captivated by this as I was its speculative fiction predecessor, Oryx and Crake. One of the things I enjoyed about the sequel was spotting the more obvious intersections between the two novels: characters from one book are either referred to or have cameo appearances in the other, the events of both stories take place across shared geographical locations and within a similar timeframe rigidly pivoted by Crake's global plague, the catastrophic upheaval of which drastically alters the life of every surviving character. Atwood's afterword, however, made it clear that I had by no means picked up on every nuance of cross-reference, and being the OCD, pernickety completist that I am, I felt compelled to immediately revisit the first novel with sequel-expanded awareness.

Atwood employs a strikingly unsensational descriptive style in both books, relating in an unsettlingly straightforward way the often harrowing ordeals undergone by her characters. Both novels remind me in particular of the satirical works of sci-fi legend Kurt Vonnegut, who routinely flattens the horrific elements any lesser author might make the glaring focal point, and who maintains the same measured evenness throughout his writing. This detached reportage has the double effect of channelling either a deeply traumatized [Cormac McCarthy] or gently sardonic [Vonnegut, Atwood] voice on the part of the writer, and of making the written word more participatory: the onus is subtly shifted onto the reader to infer from the prose that which is shocking and to react accordingly. It's a strangely persuasive literary technique that seems particularly suited to the dystopian visions of those authors.

The general tone of both novels, too, is very similar, with the tarnished veneer of near-future scientific marvel spread paper-thin over a malevolent substratum of exploitation and violence - the default, brutal human condition that constantly waits at the periphery of the stories. The events of Oryx and Crake are predominantly played out by the scientific elite and their coterie within the artificial comfort and tenuous security of the fortified corporation compounds, and the desperation of the underclasses is only glimpsed from afar - either ignored, irrelevant or used as ephemeral entertainment. Propelled by boredom and seeking illicit thrills, Crake and Jimmy seek out the worst kind of exploitative material - assisted suicides, live executions and child pornography - on dedicated sites with names like nitee-nite.com, brainfrizz.com and HotTotts, and Crake in particular eventually allows his privileged background, natural academic brilliance and general lack of human empathy to evolve into a full-blown god complex.

In The Year of the Flood, Atwood follows a logical imaginative progression to explore life on the other side of the corporate class divide. By contrast to Oryx and Crake's sole, male narrator [Atwood's first, by all accounts], The Year of the Flood is told from two markedly different female points of view. Toby and Ren are 'pleeblanders', the disenfranchised majority who struggle on with their grim, hopeless lives outside the dubious protection of the compounds. Atwood makes it unambiguous from the start that these are the urban badlands, where the corrupt and incompetent private security firms - the CorpSeCorps - turn a blind eye to racketeering, where violent, racially delineated gangs compete for supremacy and where people routinely show up dead, often in one of the garboil dumpsters where refuse is collected before being processed into fuel. Or else they disappear entirely. Atwood's twin protagonists are both exploited in one sense or another by men: Toby, a pragmatic survivor even before Crake's virus, is pursued throughout the book by Blanco, an obscenely-tattooed gangster with a predilection for raping and murdering vulnerable women, while Ren, a much younger and less serious character, has been drawn into a life of high class prostitution by the start of the story. On one hand her easy-going acceptance - indeed, active satisfaction - with her situation could be taken as proof of her comprehensive exploitation by a patriarchal culture, but this is more obviously evidence of the lengths that Ren will go to in order not just to survive but to thrive, in spite of the meagre opportunities on offer outside the compounds. Much like the sanguine points Kurt Vonnegut makes about man's inhumanity to man, Atwood's uniformly muted descriptive style benefits her general feminist stance, effectively rendering any further elaboration superfluous.

Both women are welcomed into the ranks of the God's Gardeners, an environmentally zealous religious cult mentioned several times throughout Oryx and Crake, often relating to the direct action of their more radicalized members. By today's standards they can easily be seen as insufferably worthy, but in the context of The Year of the Flood's profit-led social chasm they are the common sense counterpoint to the corporate new world order and Atwood goes to great pains to ensure they are cast in a sympathetic light. The leaders of the group - all named either Adam or Eve, depending on sex, followed by a number indicating their heirarchical position within the organization - preach humanist common sense and survivalist-level self-sufficiency, and they urge their followers to prepare for the coming 'Waterless Flood' by stockpiling imperishable food and essential items in an 'Ararat', to be relied upon for survival when the inevitable happens. It remains ambiguous as to whether head honcho Adam One is directly aware of Crake's plan to release a "hot bioform" on an unsuspecting world, but there are definite links between the group and MaddAddam, the coalition of rogue scientists that use Oryx and Crake's Extinctathon as a cover for their subversive projects. Adam One is certainly very tolerant of the erratic movements of Zeb, the coarse, larger-than-life Russian that Ren's mother moves in with after they flee the compounds, and it is more than strongly hinted that Zeb is routinely getting his hands dirty on behalf of the God's Gardeners, and that their benevolent façade might be a thoroughly realised and convincing front for more covert pursuits with a very different agenda.

Oryx and Crake's speculative mythos featured a whole raft of high-concept zoological curiosities: the pigoon, the grotesquely enlarged 'pig-balloon' genetically modified to yield human transplant organs, which unexpectedly employs sophisticated tactics while pack-hunting Snowman, suggesting that its higher brain function is rapidly evolving to match our own; the snat, the misbegotten snake/rat hybrid that very probably escaped its sealed laboratory confines following Crake's plague; the rakunk, a raccoon/skunk crossbreed incorporating the least antisocial aspects of both animal and this season's must-have designer pet. Atwood naturally uses The Year of the Flood to expand on these ideas, with yet more ironically bright Newspeak nomenclature - AnooYoo and SecretBurgers - more gene-spliced lab animals gone feral - the Mo'Hair, a genetically tweaked sheep with a luxuriant coat for human hair transplant [that nevertheless retains a distinctly ovine aroma] and the liobam, a lion-lamb fusion specifically commissioned by the Lion-Isiahist religious movement to realize one minor aspect of religious scripture - and the carte blanche terror of the Painball Arena, where society's deadliest criminals are given free rein [and acid-pellet paintball guns] to fight each other to the death for televised entertainment.

The point of Atwood's apparent flights of fancy, in these days of corporate irresponsibility that straddles the line between the legally permissible and the morally reprehensible, of happy slapping attacks posted on YouTube, of fluorescent rabbits or mice with human ears grafted onto their backs, is that to all intents and purpose we are already at the point she describes in these stories. The all-pervasive Cold War fear of Mutually Assured Destruction might be a distant memory, but the Communist/democratic political divide of yesteryear was comparatively clearly defined and easier to comprehend than today's maelstrom of religio-political jihad and fanatical splinter groups plotting [insert deity]-knows-what. If most aspects of Atwood's current enthusiasm for - or possibly creative responsibility towards - musings on the probable course of mankind's development are already in existence, then how long before some crackpot sleeper cell detonates a suitcase bomb or pops a Petri dish of some weaponized virus? It's scary, relevant stuff.

Oryx and Crake tells the story of the man who remade the world, as remembered by his closest friend; The Year of the Flood is about the ordinary, honourably-intentioned, resourceful - but mostly just plain lucky - people who survive that catastrophe. Margaret Atwood has just recently revealed that she is working on an eponymous third novel in what is already being referred to as the MaddAddam trilogy, which would follow the various characters comprising that group, as well - I hope - as detailing exactly what Zeb was up to during his numerous enigmatic absences from the Gardeners.

The environmental hymns that follow Adam One's toned down, cautionary sermons have been set to music by composer Orville Stoeber and are available on old-fashioned Compacted Diskette.

Jason Courtney's impressive Oryx and Crake-inspired illustrations [including - 'ray! - a snat] can be seen here.