“The Year of the Flood” is an epic, sprawling novel that moves back and forth between past, present and future effortlessly. Though it is told from Ren and Toby’s point of view, the novel is really about the story of three women (Ren, Toby, and Amanda) and their will to survive in a cruel and harsh world. It is a story of hope, despite all odds and a story of the power of love. Fatefulness about the survival of the species is not new. Religious thinking has end-time built in, and most of our sentient life on the planet humankind has been predominantly religious. That has changed in Westernized countries, but only relatively recently, and alongside advances in scientific knowledge. Our new pessimism no longer depends on a deity to wipe
As ever with Atwood, it is friendship between women that is noted and celebrated—friendship not without its jealousies but friendship that survives rivalry and disappointment, and has a generosity that at the end of the novel allows for hope. Atwood believes in human kind, and she likes women. It is Toby and Ren who take the novel forward from the last page, not the genetically engineered new humans. Atwood is funny and clever, such a good writer and real thinker that there’s hardly any point saying that not everything in this novel works. Why should it? A high level of creativity has to let in some chaos; just as nobody would want the world as engineered by Crake; nobody needs a factory-finished novel. The flaws in “The Year of the Flood” are part of the pleasure, as they are with human beings, that species so threatened by its own impending suicide and help up here for us to look at, mourn over, laugh at and hope for. Atwood knows how to show us ourselves, but the mirror she holds up to life does more than reflect- it’s like one of those mirrors made with mercury that gives us both a deepening and distorting effect, allowing both the depths of human nature and its potential mutations. We don’t know how we will evolve, or if we will evolve at all. “The Year of the Flood” isn’t a prophecy, but is eerily