The Year of the Flood

Margaret Atwood

Dystopian fantasy is familiar to this Booker award winner who has already sketched an alternative version of the future in her discomfiting novel The Handmaid’s Tale, which described a world in which women were reduced to the status of breeders and denied basic human rights.

If The Handmaid’s Tale was a warning about a rabid anti-feminist backlash, Oryx and Crake, and now The Year of the Flood, focus on the new hazards facing the human race: the terrifying consequences of genetic tinkering and a total environmental collapse.

More a continuation of than a sequel to Oryx and Crake, this novel begins in Year 25 — the Year of the Flood. This is the world after a man-made ‘waterless flood’ — in real terms a terrible plague of some sort — that has brought about the extinction of all but a few members of the human species.

Our narrators include Ren, an exotic dancer who has been locked in a luxury spa, and Toby, a fast food employee who has found refuge on the rooftops.

Several characters from the earlier book appear, along with some weird new groups like God’s Gardeners, an eco-religious sect that preaches love and farms the rooftops — because they can be defended from the gangs who infest the streets.

Then there are the Corporations — sinister, violent, all-encompassing organisations that appear to have taken over the role of the governments . The Corporations, and particularly their security arm, CorpSeCorps, are in total control.

The world of Year 25 is a grim place, with most of humanity dead and the few survivors scrabbling out an evidently hopeless existence. It is a terrifying world seen largely through the eyes of powerless women.

An utterly absorbing tale.