The Year of the Flood Essay Example for Free

The Year of the Flood Essay â€Å"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 out this wicked world. Since the Manhattan Project, we have learned to do these ourselves. That end is also the end of â€Å"The Year of the Flood. † Here Atwood has brilliantly re-told her own tale, through other mouths and focusing on different details, showing us how the kids Jimmy and Glenn become the Snowman and Crake, (from â€Å"Oryx and Crake†) and how an end or the End can happen in the name of new beginning. The Waterless Flood has long been predicted by God’s Gardeners, a back-to-nature cult founded by Adam One. Its members live simply and organically, sing terrible hymns, have no dress sense and peddle a bolted-together theology, difficult to think about if you think at all. With values diametrically opposed to those of the ruling CorpSEcorps, the Gardeners aren’t â€Å"the answer,† but at least they’ve asked enough questions to avoid a life of endless shopping and face-lifts. The Gardeners sometimes do evangelical work in the mean streets, known as the pleeblands, or picket at fast-food joints like SecretBurgers because it’s wrong to eat anything with a face. At SecretBurgers they have rescued a young woman named Toby from the murderous clutches of her sex-crazed boss, Blanco the Bloat, and it’s Toby who is one of the central characters in the post-plague part of the story. As a Gardener, Toby rises to the position of Eve Six, in charge of the bees, herbs and potions, but Blanco never stops pursuing her, and to save herself, and the group, she receives a new identity in the health spa AnooYoo. Recovering from plastic surgery, she avoids the deathly wipeout germ of plague. Less cosmetically, but just as effectively, Ren, a pole dancer at a local sex joint called Scales and Tails, is in an isolation room after a bloody attack by a punter, so she too misses the bio-bug. The women’s past and present stories alternate and intertwine, bringing to life the world they must survive in- a world where pigs have human tissues and sheep are bred with human hair in different colors, silver and purple being the hot hits for whole-head implants, providing you don’t mind smelling of lamb chops when it rains. The sensitive CorpSEcorps elite boy Glenn, who becomes Crake, starts out as a teenage sympathizer for the Gardeners but is too seduced by his own brain power to trust nature. Like his friend Jimmy, Glenn doesn’t know to love, and the awkward devotion he feels for the girl he calls Oryx isn’t returned. Atwood is really good at showing, without judging, what happens when human beings cannot love. In the worst of them, like Blanco, brutality and sadism take over. In the better of them, Crake designs out love and romance because he wants to design out the pain and confusion of emotion. In this strangely lonely book, where neither love or romance changes the narrative, friendship of a real and lasting and risk-taking kind stands against the emotional emptiness of the money/sex/power/consumer world of CorpSEcorps, and as the proper antidote to the plague—mongering of Crake and Jimmy, for whom humankind holds so little promise. 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 â€Å"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. â€Å"The Year of the Flood† isn’t a prophecy, but is eerily possible.