As absurd as some of their beliefs appear, Atwood seems to be suggesting that they're a better option than the naked materialism of the corporations. Yet the gentleness and benignity of the Gardeners is a source of hope as well as humor. Atwood plays some of their religion for laughs: their hymns have a comically bouncing, churchy rhythm, and we learn that both Ren and Toby have been drawn toward the sect for nonreligious reasons. Led by the charismatic Adam One, whose sermons and eco-hymns punctuate the narrative, the God's Gardeners are preparing for life after the prophesied Waterless Flood. The novel centers on the lives of Ren and Toby, female members of a fundamentalist sect of Christian environmentalists, the God's Gardeners. But while the first novel focused on the privileged elite in the compounds and the morally bankrupt corporations, The Year of the Floodĭepicts more of the world of the pleebs, an edgy no-man's land inhabited by criminals, sex workers, dropouts and the few individuals who are trying to resist the grip of the corporations. , she revisits that same world and its catastrophe.īegins just after the catastrophe and then tracks back in time over the corrupt and degenerate world that preceded it. In her profoundly imagined new book, The Year of the Flood The novel seemed complete, closing on a moment of suspense, as though Atwood was content simply to hint at the direction life would now take. At the end of the book, we left its central character, Jimmy, in the aftermath of a devastating man-made plague, as he wondered whether to befriend or attack a ragged band of strangers. Mass extinctions had taken place, while genetic experiments had populated the planet with strange new breeds of animal: liobams, Mo'Hairs, rakunks. The world she envisaged was in the throes of catastrophic climate change, its wealthy inhabitants dwelling in sterile secure compounds, its poor ones in the dangerous “pleeblands” of decaying inner cities.

, Margaret Atwood depicted a dystopic planet tumbling toward apocalypse. In her 2002 speculative novel, Oryx and Crake

The year of the flood book