Written by Margaret Atwood
As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn’t imagine how it was that you hadn’t known it before. Like stage music, knowledge before you knew it took place before your very eyes, but you were looking elsewhere.
As a sequel, The Year of the Flood doesn’t quite have the same punch as Oryx and Crake. That sublime first novel was a slow, tragic descent into the dark side for many of its characters…and then they took the future of the Earth along for the ride. On this occasion, the cross-over characters are fairly remote to the main thrust of the story, and the tone of both novels isn’t quite compatible.
As a stand alone novel, The Year of the Flood is compelling, exciting, outrageous and violent. Its characters keep you glued to the page, and it makes you hate yourself for trying to stop reading…your attention is positively demanded!
Always a good quality in a novel. ;-)
Oryx and Crake was a novel without hope. There was an inevitability to the destruction of Earth — completely unstoppable. We were on the sidelines, as if watching the sinking of Titanic, and unable to shout a warning to anyone. But Year of the Flood involves us in two lives that don’t have inevitable end points…we’re travelling with them, moment to moment, even in the flash-forward sequences. The one thing that’s added to the mix is tangible hope. It exists, it’s within reach, and we want our characters to achieve some sort of happiness. We’re on the edge of our seats the entire duration of the novel.
There are some iffy moments. At times, the futurist POV is much more hyper-real in its outrageousness, compared to the view in Oryx and Crake. It’s as if Atwood is pushing the possibilities harder and harder, for more comic and violent effect…daring us to stay with the ride, or hop off before it transmutes into complete, banana craziness. How far can we go? How much can we take? It’s to her credit as a writer that she never pushes the reader (or the future society) over a cliff…but she comes very close.
Then there is the ending. It rams into the conclusion of Oryx and Crake with the force of a steamroller…and the end result isn’t what I would call harmonious. It takes the elegiac nature of the first novel and tries to up the action quotient…and it simply doesn’t mesh. On top of that, the final pages take what amounts to an enormous deep breath…
…and the story stops! Not unpleasantly, not disastrously…but it does stop. Unsatisfied is the word that best fits the situation.
I’d have to say that Year of the Flood doesn’t quite live up to the amazing impact of Oryx and Crake. But even mid-range Atwood is 99% better than most other novels currently on the shelves…and it’s never less than an exciting read. Not what I was expecting, less than I was hoping for…but worth the read nevertheless.
At the very least, you’ll conclusively decide if you’re a carnivore or a herbivore at heart. ;-)
