OVERVIEW/ANALYSIS: In a nearby future dominated by corporations like "HelthWyzer", in which the state has

broken down under its fiscal burdens and environmental damage, humanity is separated in several categories. On top
and living in isolated gated compounds and rarely interacting with the outside for fear of contamination, kidnapping
or worse, the "corps people" themselves, then the "pleebs" eking out a leaving in the corporations commercial
outlets ("Secret Burgers", "Happicuppa", "A Noo Yoo"...) and finally the "human refuse", the easily disposable and
killed for their organs, protein calories or carbon components. Genetic manipulations and strange new life forms
(liobams, enhanced pigs and many more) created in labs for various purposes, some more benign, some not so, are
the order of the day.

Everything is policed by the corporate thugs "CorpSeCorps" who dispense summary "justice" at gunpoint, being the
only ones allowed to be armed with their famous "sprayguns". For offenders against corporate interests there is
usually summary arrest and torture under the "internal rendition" acts, followed by killing or occasionally a chance
to be a "painballer", modern gladiators whose deaths in special fighting forest-arenas are filmed for the benefit of the
masses. And there are pseudo green-religious fringe cults like the Gardeners or the WolfIsaiahists which are
tolerated as long as they seem nonthreatening.

Familiar and strange, mundane and imaginative, the world of the two novels as described above comes to
magnificent life in so many little details in "The Year of the Flood" that it becomes one of the most important
characters of the book; as we know from the beginning, during the title year, or Year Twenty-Five in the Gardener
chronology, this world is murdered by the "Waterless Flood" which in a biblical parallel sweeps most humanity
away by means of a deadly virulent pandemic which leaves most animals including the new lab species untouched
and inheritors of the Earth with only selected Noah-like humans as survivors.

"The Year of the Flood" alternates third person narrative with first person narrative from two such survivors:

Toby, a middle aged manager of a "A Noo Yoo" spa for the rich pampered corps women, is formerly known as Eve
6 of the most influential Gardener group led by famous "preacher" Adam One whose superb sermons scattered
through the book are a big highlight. A young woman in Year Five when she escaped the clutches of her violent
boss Blanco to live among the Gardeners, Toby discovers a talent for plants, bees, teaching life-lore and becomes an
influential Gardener, while she develops friendship with Adam' "second in command", mysterious tough guy Zeb
who is partner of jealous fugitive corps wife Lucerne and "stepfather" of second pov Ren. Her narrative is the
"adult" one through which the fate of the world unfolds.

Ren aka Brenda is currently a trapeze artist and occasional prostitute in the famous "Scales and Tails"
establishment. Born with the Gardener chronology, so twenty five at present, we see the unfolding events through
her childhood eyes since her mother ran away from her luxurious but cramped position as corporate wife to take
refuge with lover Zeb in the Gardener compound.

At thirteen Ren meets a pleeb girl Amanda who becomes her best friend and later she meets Jimmy, Glenn aka
Crake and Oryx and through her we have the main link with "Oryx and Crake" point of view of the events

The writing in this novel is daring in its sheer inclusiveness. It includes violence, obscenity, comedy, doubt,
yearning, endurance and love. The work is haunted by death and the effects of death, and even more by survival and
the struggle to survive. It is compelling in the precision with which moments and feelings are communicated: The
child Ren, praised, gets “a warm feeling, like nasturtiums.”

Mordant humour and tenderness combine. Ren tells her story in first person and present tense; Toby is equally
present, but in past tense and third person. That kind of subtle variation not only suggests differences between the
two narrators – Toby older, less exposed, less febrile than Ren – it also offers to us as readers a variation of pace and
perspective that makes this heady novel surprisingly easy to read.

Also, there is a balance between the two. In Oryx and Crake, we focused a lot on the relationship between men:
between Snowman and his father, Crake and his father, between Crake and Snowman themselves. In The year of the
Flood, the characters that Atwood focuses on and develops are female: Toby and Ren, Amanda Payne and more.

Before surviving biological peril, Toby and Ren first have to make it through the man-made horror of life governed
by a giant corporation. (The mammoth Buy ‘N’ Large in “Wall-E” never dreamed of the extremes of the
CorpSeCorps, who make Big Brother just look nosy.) This future is so toxic, the plague is almost beside the point.

The Gardeners, who revere saints like Dian Fossey and Jacques Cousteau, stand in quirky, shabbily dressed
opposition to the institutionalized murder, torture, and corporation-induced disease surrounding them. Both Toby
and Ren become members, Ren as a child and Toby as a reluctant elder. The Gardeners rescued Toby from
systematic rape by her boss at her fast-food job, and, while she doesn’t really believe their doctrine, she is grateful
for her quiet life teaching herbal remedies and keeping bees. (And I was grateful Atwood stopped describing what
was in the burgers.) Ren, meanwhile, ends up leaving the cult as a teenager and becoming a trapeze artist at a sex
club.

(Did I mention that society was depraved?) Both women were attacked by men, and when the plague strikes, Toby is
in hiding and Ren is healing in an isolation chamber.

The novel occurs mostly in flashbacks as Toby and Ren reflect separately on what happened before humanity got its
collective ticket punched. Toby especially wonders why she was spared. “ ‘Who lives here?’ she says out loud. Not
me, she thinks. This thing I’m doing can hardly be called living. Instead I’m lying dormant, like a bacterium in a
glacier. Getting time over with. That’s all.” Toby wonders, from her pink sanctuary, Anoo Yoo, a former spa, “Why
has she been saved alive? Out of the countless millions. Why not someone younger, someone with more optimism
and fresher cells?”

The plot follows a religious group called the Gardeners who are waiting for what their scripture calls the Waterless
Flood. While they wait, they live simply, following customs from earlier generations; they keep bees, wear top-to-
toes (cloaks of a sort), celebrate saints' days, sing hymns, grow their own food (vegetarian), and heal wounds using
maggots. However, many of their hymns include modern scientific concepts like DNA and evolution. We learn later
in the novel that the Gardeners have been secretly using modern communications systems to keep in touch with
other groups across the country. But the overall feeling of the group is of resisting modernity, sometimes to the
disgust of its teenage members.

The Waterless Flood - a disease pandemic - indeed arrives. Most people are killed. Many of the Gardeners we're
following survive, thanks to their old-fashioned knowledge. They're forced to interact with the Exfernal World a bit
more than they'd like. However, as the novel unfolds, we learn of the many ways they've already been individually
interacting with that world, often to their detriment. After the Waterless Flood, some of the Gardeners reunite and
share survival stories.
What's remarkable about this novel is Atwood's ability to write a world that feels so very familiar, yet so futuristic,
at the same time. It's a joy to read the language describing animals, technology, and places that don't exist but that
are still immediately recognizable. Some of the book is set in Scales and Tails, a (shall we call it) gentleman's club,
where the dancers wear Biofilm Bodygloves, some of which shimmer with scales. SecretBurger employs wage-
slaves. People who come from the Compound say things like "Illness is a design flaw. It could be corrected."
CorpSeCorps serves as the police force. Criminals are put into the Painball Pit, where they fight to the death with
sprayguns. Women primp at AnooYoo spa.

The exfernals in this novel have created green rabbits and Mo'Hairs (sheep with long, soft, brightly colored fur).
One of the religious groups has created a liobam to hurry the time when the lion will lie down with the lamb. (It's a
member of the Peaceable Kingdom list.) But they've also wrecked the earth. They live with the horrors of rape,
forced prostitution, and a wide gulf between the haves and have-nots. They're no better off than we are. The
Gardeners revere the planet, and the book is framed with Adam One's sermons and the Gardeners' hymns. (A first
stanza: "We praise the tiny perfect Moles/That garden underground;/The Ant, the Worm, the Nematode,/Wherever
they are found.") But they keep apart from the rest of humanity and find themselves mostly impotent after the
Waterless Flood.

Note – One of the pleasures of reading Oryx and Crake & The Year of the Flood comes from the discoveries and
revelations that happen throughout. It would be wrong, and irresponsible as a reviewer, for me to ruin that. So this
is a strange (and ridiculously long) review. Perhaps it is less a review and more of an enthusiastic endorsement.
Preferring to err on the side of caution, I’ve provided almost no plot summary and only one very small excerpt.
What I hope I have retained and conveyed is my admiration for these books, as well as what I feel makes them so
special.

Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood revisits the dystopian world first introduced in Oryx and Crake. It is a
future that appears all too possible, as Ms. Atwood follows current science to its logical conclusion. In her brave
new world the class and wealth divide has been sharply drawn between those living in the Compounds (private,
gated communities) and those locked out in the Pleeblands (poor, urban centers). Global corporations – called the
CorpSeCorps – control everything. Genetically altered bio-forms and foods are an insidious part of daily life.
Religious cults, such as the God’s Gardeners, predict the coming of a waterless flood and attract converts from all
levels of society. Read together, these two novels succeed in creating a beautifully realized, if deeply disturbing,
vision of what could be.

And yet this vision is anything but bleak and depressing. Ms. Atwood avoids the gloom & doom by enlisting
engaging and sympathetic narrators. Jimmy (also called Snowman) is the endearing slacker raised in the
Compounds who told us the original, strange story of Oryx and of Crake. In contrast, The Year of the Flood is
narrated by two women: Toby, who survived the worst that the Pleeblands could throw at a person to become an
unlikely elder of the God’s Gardeners. And Ren, a sweet girl raised as both a God’s Gardener and a compound
brat, who eventually chooses to become a dancer at the legendary Pleeblands’ sex club Scales & Tails. It gives little
away to tell you that all three survive the waterless flood – in actuality a global pandemic – each for different
reasons and in different circumstances. At the end of the world Margaret Atwood manages to provide her readers
with hope.

Admittedly this hope isn’t as apparent in Oryx and Crake, which on first reading can be unsatisfying. (Particularly
when it was first release and before anyone expected there to be a second book). I felt that it left too many
unanswered questions and blank spaces. Imagine putting together a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle and realizing you
only have eight hundred of the pieces. Sure the picture is there, but only partially. These holes in the picture are a
difficulty intrinsic to true first person narrators. Jimmy is a child of the Compounds who never fits in. His
knowledge of the Pleeblands is that of a rich kid slumming. He is Crake’s intellectual inferior and has an
incomplete understanding of what Crake has done. Jimmy does not (cannot) explain the who’s, how’s and why’s.
He’s limited to relating the end result, fulfilling the role which Crake assigned to him. His narration of Oryx and
Crake is a tortured attempt to figure out what the hell happened. In the end Jimmy can only tell us what he
knows… which, we ultimately discover, isn’t all that much. While beautifully written and absorbing, Oryx and
Crake alone can be frustrating.

The Year of the Flood fills in many, though not all, of those pieces of information missing from Oryx and Crake.
The reader is still restricted to one narrator’s knowledge and experiences at a time, but both Toby and Ren move
further towards bridging the gaps in our knowledge. Whereas Jimmy knew the Compounds best, Toby knows the
Pleeblands. Her main contribution is an intimate knowledge of the God’s Gardeners, which plays an integral part in
the larger overall story and which Jimmy only had a peripheral awareness of. As an Eve (the Gardeners’ leaders are
called Adams and Eves), it is she who relays the history and politics of the group. It is also her Pleeblands past,
always close by, which provides the main source of suspense in the novel.

The most interesting of the three narrators, in my mind, is Ren. She straddles the line between both worlds,
wandering around like some contemporary version of Candide. Everyone underestimates her, including herself.
She is the closest Atwood comes to a third person narrator (and it’s not all that close) – because she is always a little
bit apart from and outside of the inner circles where decisions get made. At the same time, she is in many ways the
common link between people and stories. Often she is the key component in setting events into motion – willing the
direction they will take. I found her character surprising and intriguing. Attributing her survival of the waterless
flood to dumb luck seems a bit disingenuous. Ren has the gift of taking the bad situations that happen to her and
turning them. Her seeming innocence and fragility may very well be her survival tool, like the bio-engineered
kudzu-moth caterpillars Toby finds in her garden: “In one of those jokey moves so common in the first years of
gene-splicing, their designer gave them a baby face at the front end, with big eyes and a happy smile, which makes
them remarkably difficult to kill.”

Telling a story from multiple perspectives isn’t new. Faulkner did it, as did others. But seldom has it been
accomplished so thoroughly and completely as in Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. The reader is only
allowed to know as much, or as little as each of the narrators. And the narrators have only their own, narrow
perspective on any and all incidents. So it is the readers who discover and make connections that no one character,
alone, has the ability to do. That is in a large part what makes these novels so enjoyable. To this, Atwood has
added yet another layer. The God’s Gardeners are a religion and as such they have both sermons and hymns. Both
are included as part of The Year of the Flood. The sermons are given by Adam One, the leader of the Gardeners.
They provide insight, as well as comfort. (They also provide the chapter divisions and titles). Atwood strikes just
the right tone, sometimes profound and sometimes ridiculous. They lend the religion authenticity. Later in the book
they allow us a window into what goes on in the Edencliff Rooftop Garden (home of the God’s Gardeners), even
after the flood. Even after our narrators are no longer there.

I was very happy to learn that Margaret Atwood is not finished with this world she has created. In a recent
interview with the L.A. Times she stated that should she live long enough, there will be another book. (It’s not an
idle concern by the way… just ask anyone who has invested the better part of the last two decades reading Robert
Jordan’s Wheel of Time series). The implication is that it will explore the same time period as the first two novels,
this time from the perspective of the group that forms the more bio-terrorist (though that may be too severe) arm of
the God’s Gardeners: Mad Adam. Many of the members of Mad Adam ended up in Crake’s lab working on his
Paradice Project, which provides the tie-in to Oryx and Crake. Apparently there is more to this fascinating story,
and I am glad to have another reason to wish Margaret Atwood many, many years of good health. As Adam One
would say, let us put light around her.

Book vs. Audio: I first listened to The Year of the Flood as a download from Audibles.com, and I highly
recommend it. I am told there is both a UK and a U.S. version – mine was the U.S. version which is read by three
distinct readers. There are two women (for Toby & Ren) and a man who reads Adam One’s sermons – all of whom
do a fabulous job. The only sour note is the hymns. They are performed with music, and the production is poor. At
times it was difficult to understand the lyrics, and to be completely honest I came to dread them. But overall, the
main readings were so well done that I was happy that this was my first experience of the novel and highly
recommend it. Afterwards, I bought the hardcover for a more careful reading.

The Year of the Flood is the companion novel and, at least in a small part, the sequel to Oryx and Crake. I don’t
think this has been explained very well by the media. Atwood manages to intertwine the two stories so perfectly that
it seems impossible that they were written separately. I encourage anyone who intends to read the one, to read
both. And while it is true that the order they can be read in is somewhat interchangeable, I recommend reading
Oryx and Crake first. The books share the same ending, but that ending is taken a little bit farther in The Year of
the Flood.

Lady Oracle has been quiet the last six years. Yes, there have been half a dozen books, an opera even. But no novels,
and it is in her novels that Margaret Atwood spins the most arresting alternate mythologies to our hell-bent world.
From 1972's "Surfacing," a virtuoso rewriting of the Demeter myth, to "The Handmaid's Tale," with its baroquely
imagined future in which women are slaves, Atwood's best books are dream capsules in which greed, destructive
anti-environmentalism, religious fundamentalism and the constant desire to subject the will of women combine into
a proto-fascist force.
Because Atwood thinks deeply on these matters, her vision is often bleak. So it's a welcome surprise that her new
novel, "The Year of the Flood," is a slap-happy romp through the end times. Stuffed with cornball hymns, genetic
mutations worthy of Thomas Pynchon (such as the rakuunk, a combined skunk and raccoon) and a pharmaceutical
company run amok, it reads like dystopia verging on satire. She may be imagining a world in flames, but she's doing
it with a dark cackle.

The tone here couldn't be more different from that of "Oryx and Crake," the 2003 Man Booker finalist that this book
rewrites and retells. That novel was the apocalypse done in dour tones and mythopoetic images, part Doris Lessing,
part H.G. Wells. A new race of beings called the Crakes wanders a blasted moonscape, trying to decide whether it is
worth rebooting the planet after it has been decimated by a brutally swift plague. The source of the holocaust was a
pill called BlyssPluss, which didn't cause happiness, but rather death. Two characters, Jimmy the Snowman and
Glenn, dominate the telling.

"The Year of the Flood" chronicles the same story from a female point of view. Again, two survivors, Toby and
Ren, form the crux of the tale. Toby waits out the plague in a former spa, where plastic surgery was to mask her
identity from a sadistic rapist. Ren, a sex worker, ducks the damage in an isolation room at Scales and Tails, a strip
club where she wound up working because it had good health and dental benefits.

Jumping back and forth in time, Atwood evokes the women's jagged journey to this grim end. Their stories are
parables of survival, in which the simple desire to subsist means going with the system, even when the system is
designed to grind them up. At one point, Toby works at a fast food joint called SecretBurgers, which is rumored to
use cat flesh and worse in its patties. When she is rescued from the work -- and her sexually abusive boss -- by a
group of back-to-the-land radicals called God's Gardeners, it seems a reprieve, except that the Gardeners have
equally damaging ideas of a woman's role in society. Unlike "Oryx and Crake," which deliberately shaded away
from specifics, "The Year of the Flood" is littered with clues, many quite amusing, about the seesaw between
invention and perversion that led to the end of the world. As in all science fiction, part of the fun is seeing what
could have worked and didn't. Junked-up solar cars litter the landscape, and pigs with human brains dig through
rubbish. Other threads strike a deeper vein. Toby's memories of her mother's slow death from a disease most likely
manufactured to help sell a pharmaceutical company's cure gives us a glimpse of a world in which profit has
outstripped any desire for medicine to heal.

The greatest tinkering and mulching in Atwood's lost world involves belief systems. God's Gardeners read the Bible
as an environmentalist tract, and Atwood splices the sermons of one of their prophets, Adam One, into her text,
alongside hymns and other homilies. April Fools' Day and the story of the loaves and fishes, for instance, are
combined into April Fish Day: "On April Fish Day, which originated in France, we make fun of one another by
attaching a Fish of paper, or, in our case, a Fish of recycled cloth, to the back of another person and then crying out,
April Fish!"

Juxtaposing this gobbledygook with the chronicles of Ren and Toby, Atwood creates the novel's spookiest effect.
Here is a world in which the reigning mythologies aren't just wrong-headed but have absolutely nothing to do with
the real lives of those living in their shadows. And the coming plague only serves to vivify the advocates of these
beliefs.

Meanwhile, Ren and Toby suffer in silence, where pain is just pain, not prologue or premonition. It is a wonder that
so many in this world and ours turn to pills to numb it. But as "The Year of the Flood" boldly shows, that has its
perils too.