Arts

A Margaret Atwood Novel With Actual Humans

Year of the Flood has the usual sex slaves, but also recognizable people.

How’s this for a timely plot line?  In Margaret Atwood’s  new novel, The Year of the Flood,  a corporation named “HelthWyzer” runs the world. The company’s insight is that long, slow illnesses are the key to profits. As in all good dystopias, our own world is recognizable in her imagined one. There are plausible people here, and the novel succeeds in making the reader care about what the “Corps” is doing to them despite the stagy set-up. For an apocalyptic novel, it’s surprisingly hopeful and even funny.

In The Year of the Flood, Atwood delivers on all her obsessions: female enslavement, a ravaged earth, the power of religion, and the pleasure of satire. The story centers on two women, Toby and the younger Ren, former members of a radically vegetarian religious sect, God’s Gardeners, led by a man they call Adam One. The women have survived the Waterless Flood—a genetically engineered plague that wipes out most of the population—and reflect on their lives before the Flood while hiding out from the plague in a spa compound (Toby) and in the well-appointed but securely locked quarantine suite of a sex club called Scales and Tails (Ren).

Atwood’s narrative energy does not flag here as it does in some of her more didactic novels. These characters are compelling where those in her most recent novel, Oryx and Crake (2003), were widely criticized as flat. The world imagined in Oryx and Crake returns in The Year of the Flood, and this time Ren and Toby make the setup human. Distinct voices and histories set these women apart. One might want to dial down Ren’s narcissism, but it’s a mark of Atwood’s success that a reader can have such feelings about her. She surely doesn’t deserve to be a sex worker, or, worse, suffer at the hands of the Painballers (ex-convicts, their name taking on its darkest sexual meaning).

Toby is the one you’d want as your friend. Orphaned as a teenager, she winds up working at the disgusting SecretBurger (mystery meat has become a selling point), where she is pressed into service as sex slave to the manager, Blanco. Before Blanco has the chance to dispose of her (his last girlfriend turned up dead), she accepts rescue by a group of God’s Gardeners, sent by a former coworker who has converted to the group’s extreme vegetarian counterculture. Skeptical Toby becomes a convert only slowly. She’s unfitted to the loopy pieties, mulchy cuisine, and bad hymn literature. She eventually becomes an “Eve,” one of the group’s leaders, not because she believes their theology, but because she has embraced their practice. A good bit of narrative is taken up with the story of this process, and that’s a strength in the novel; there’s as much about bees and recycling as there is about sexual abuse.

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