The Year of the Flood

I read the first book in this series (Oryx & Crake) nearly eight years ago, so it's a good thing that this book is more a companion piece than a direct sequel. It returns to the same world and roughly the same time as O&C, but where that book explored that world through a man's eyes, from inside the exclusive corporate bubbles, this one looks at it from the perspective of two women, who live out in the “real world”. Toby was raised in relative comfort, but circumstances derail her path and she finds herself working a low-wage retail job where she's sexually abused by her boss. She escapes from his clutches with the help of the God's Gardeners, a new religious movement focused on preserving what's left of the natural world, and remains with the group first from a lack of anywhere else to go, and then from loyalty. One of the young people being raised within the group is Ren, whose mother brought her along when she left their cushy corporate home to run away with one of the group's leaders, a man named Zeb. Though set in the time just after the plague has been unleashed on the world, the story is told largely through flashbacks, following both Toby's and Ren's lives with the Gardeners and what happens to them after they have separately left the group. I was, as ever, blown away with the power of Atwood's imagination. So much of the way the world devolves feels heightened but not outside the realm of possibility, which makes it all the more haunting, and she develops the theology of the Gardeners with hymns and sermons from their leader, Adam One, in a way that feels realistic for something that would emerge in the context of the world she posits. After the maleness of O&C, the focus on Jimmy and Glenn (both of whom do show up in the narrative here in side roles), it's refreshing to have Toby and Ren as narrators of The Year of the Flood, and the two women are both richly-drawn and compelling in their own ways. Atwood's prose remains top-notch, I find her writing spellbinding in a way I find difficult to put my finger on but I get lost in so easily. There are some flaws here, most notably the way that several survivors manage to reconnect in a plague-decimated world in a way that defies probability, but the storytelling is too enjoyable otherwise to make that a fatal flaw.