Book #10: The Year of the Flood

Title: The Year of the Flood
Author: Margaret Atwood


You can talk to me all you like about why I should like science fiction, but it's never going to be the genre that attracts me most. Maybe I'm unimaginative or something, I don't know. Anyway, The Year of the Flood is set in a North America of the future, after the world has seen the consequences of both global warming and rampant corporate scientific greed. This is a highly-fractured world, with well-educated corporate types living behind gates, corporate police keeping order, crime and gangs ruling cities, and religious cults reacting against the whole of it. Ren and Toby both end up living with the Gardeners, a group of religious vegetarians who live a simple life and revere Saints E.O. Wilson and Mahatma Gandhi. Both end up leaving the group, but come together again after a plague destroys most of the world's population.

There are some authors whose entire body of work deserves to be read, even when she writes in a genre that you're not really all that into. For me, reading Margaret Atwood's more straightforward fiction, like The Blind Assassin, is like a most delicious entree: it's substantial, it's filling, it's challenging, and when I put the book away, I'm fully sated and see the world differently. I see the world differently after reading The Year of the Flood too (in a scare-the-pants-off-me kind of way), but instead of feeling like I ate a delicious and complex entree, I feel more like I got a heaping portion of vegetables. Good for me, yes, and substantial too, but not as enjoyable as some of her other work.