According to Adam One, the Fall of Man was multidimensional. The ancestral primates fell out of the trees; then they fell from vegetarianism into meat-eating. Then they fell from instinct into reason, and thus into technology; from simple signals into complex grammar, and thus into humanity; from firelessness into fire, and then into weaponry; and from seasonal mating into an incessant sexual twitching. Then they fell from a joyous life in the moment into the anxious contemplation of the vanished past and the distant future.
When I first listened to the audio version of The Year of the Flood, shortly after the book’s release in 2009, I barely made it through; not because its dystopic premises were improbable, but because they were not. It had been years since I’d read The Handmaid’s Tale, and I had missed Oryx and Crake, a 2003 novel that shares its frightening setting and several characters with The Year of the Flood. Still, The Year of the Flood was so compelling that it stayed with me, and I recently listened to it again.
The Year of the Flood begins with Toby, who is counting the bullets remaining for her antique rifle, assessing her dwindling supply of stored food, worrying that genetically altered pigs will attack her if she ventures out of the health club she once managed, and wondering whether anyone else has survived “the waterless flood:” a lethal pandemic that an unprincipled bioengineer called Crake has released into a world already in steep decline. Toby doesn’t know what started the plague, or the extent of its damage, but she does know that she is running out of supplies and will soon have to forage.
Meanwhile, Ren, a young trapeze dancer who survived the plague because she was locked inside the quarantine room of a brothel called Scales and Tails, is wondering whether there is anyone left to let her out before she starves. She knows that murder and looting followed the plague’s onset; she’d watched that much on closed-circuit television before transmittals stopped.
In the years before the waterless flood, Toby grew up on a farm, and Ren in one of the gated compounds belonging to the CorpSeCorps, multinational corporations that policed the earth and controlled its resources. The environment had already changed beyond recognition: the sun was relentless, most of the former North America was a desert, and the filthy oceans had moved far inland. Genetically altered creatures such as Rakunks, Liobams, Mo’Hairs, and Wolvogs roamed the remaining fringes of the natural world, into which Crake had also released genetically altered human-like creatures, the naïve but physically arresting Children of Crake. The dysfunctional cities, with their broken infrastructures and dangerous underworlds, were called “the Pleeblands.” There, anyone could be captured for organ harvesting or reduction to “garboil,” sex was cynically commercial, and nature was hardly remembered.
Cultivating “Ararats” within the cities were The Gardeners, streetwise pacifist vegetarians who grew rooftop gardens, eschewed technology, and relied upon oral tradition, since the CorpSeCorps could trace and torment anyone who committed anything to writing.
The Human moral keyboard is limited, Adam One used to say: there’s nothing you can play on it that hasn’t been played before. And, my dear Friends, I am sorry to say this, but it has its lower notes.
The Gardeners’ leaders, the “Adams” and “Eves,” taught beekeeping and other practical skills to their followers, and observed feast days honoring luminaries such as St. Diane Fossey and St. Euell Gibbons.
Though Atwood gently satirizes The Gardeners, with their baggy clothes, disgustingly wholesome foods, and irregular bathing habits, they are clearly among the few heroes of the awful world they have inherited. They offer some sensible commandments, such as “never ingest a pill manufactured by a corporation.”
In intertwined flashbacks, Toby and Ren recount their respective histories before, after, and during their overlapping years with The Gardeners. Among the flashbacks are homilies by the mysterious Adam One, and sung renditions of Gardeners’ Hymns.
For more, check http://yearoftheflood.com/us/.
Bernadette Dunne, Katie MacNichol, and Mark Bramhall narrate the audiobook. Orville Stoeber, who wrote the Gardeners’ Hymns, sings them on the recording; samples appear at the link above.
Although The Year of the Flood builds upon Oryx and Crake, it isn’t necessary to have read the one to follow the other. Having now read both, I’m looking with more appreciation than ever at my green little corner of the world.
Long may it last.
