Pink Makes Such Terrible Camouflage

It’s occurred to me to wonder what Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel “The Road” would be like if the two survivors were not a father and son but a mother and daughter. I picture the mother plodding through the ashy landscape, coughing, wishing she had some Kleenex. The daughter sulks and dreams about that cute boy at school. They pause to shoot a marauder. They raid a drugstore for tampons. They trudge on.

There are echoes of my fantasy in Margaret Atwood’s new novel “The Year of the Flood.” Where would women go to escape a genetically engineered global pandemic? The stern and lonely Toby has barricaded herself into a day spa called AnooYoo, where women once came for the latest rejuvenation and beauty modification treatments. Young Ren hides in her former workplace, a strip club called “Scales and Tails” where the performers dress up as exotic fish and birds. Both women happen to know a thing or two about survival. They are members of God’s Gardeners, a hippie religious group and sometime ecoterrorist cell.

Atwood’s book, like McCarthy’s, is dystopian fiction: it uses an imaginary future to represent or criticize the present. It’s the kind of science fiction that’s considered safe for literary writers. Orwell, Huxley, and Doris Lessing all tried it out, as have Kazuo Ishiguro (in “Never Let Me Go”), José Saramago (“Blindness”), and Jeanette Winterson (“The Stone Gods”). Atwood too, over her long and impressively varied career, has dabbled in dystopia, notably in her 1985 “The Handmaid’s Tale,” in which women are enslaved as child-bearers under a Christian fundamentalist regime.

“The Year of the Flood” is a sequel to Atwood’s 2003 novel “Oryx and Crake,” which predicted the end of the world through environmental catastrophe. In “Oryx and Crake,” the earth is becoming a depleted wasteland. The old species are rapidly disappearing, while medical corporations have begun manipulating genetic patterns to create new ones. In order to save the earth, Crake, a cynical young mad scientist, develops and releases a virus to wipe out the human race. His plan is to replace Homo Sapiens with a less destructive, more aesthetically pleasing species of his own design.

“The Year of the Flood” is a much livelier, more original, and in its own way more cheerful book. For one thing, it’s told by women, and so deals with the material, tampon-and-Kleenex conditions of female lives. It’s no surprise Toby and Ren find refuge in a beauty salon and a brothel: Atwood, a great satirist, is always amazed at what women are given to work with. (On a rescue mission dressed in one of the spa’s coveralls, Toby sighs that pink is a “terrible choice for camouflage.”) And while “Oryx and Crake” took aim at some obvious targets, including corporate greed, agribusiness, and genetic modification, the new book offers an unexpected, playful philosophy for change.

An Atwood novel generally starts at the end, then goes back to the beginning, usually her characters’ childhood: her sharpest social criticism often comes from children’s point of view. “The Year of the Flood” begins with Ren and Toby waiting out the plague, then narrates their past in the God’s Gardeners movement. Ren comes to the Gardeners as a child, dragged along in the wake of her mother’s sexual obsession with the mysterious Zeb, known as “Mad Adam.” The older Toby, whose parents have been murdered by a sinister pharmaceutical company, is rescued by the Gardeners from the clutches of a sadistic boss. Through their eyes, we learn about what turns out to be a fairly endearing set of heroes.

God’s Gardeners are a religious sect who believe that humans were put on earth to honor and protect God’s creation. Based in an urban jungle somewhere in what used to be the United States (Atwood, a Canadian, prefers to set her dystopias south of the border), they practice organic rooftop gardening, wear hand-dyed clothing that looks like it’s “been sewn by elves on hash,” eat turnips, steer clear of deodorant. Honoring such holy figures as Saint Maria Sibylla Merian, Saint Dian Fossey, and Saint Jacques Cousteau, they appear to be a “clutch of sweet but delusional eccentrics.” Yet their spiritual leader, Adam One, encourages the Gardeners not only to grow their own food and recycle but to learn survival techniques and maintain “Ararats,” by which he means stores of canned food for in the time of the “Waterless Flood.” The Gardeners have their defenses, too. As the group’s gentle herbalist remarks, “God wouldn’t have made poisonous mushrooms unless He intended us to use them sometimes.”

Adam One’s sermons are an affectionate and deeply funny parody of Christianity’s grappling with science and evolution. Discussing the Fall of Man for his devoutly vegetarian audience, Adam One comments, “Some say that the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was a fig, others prefer a date, yet others a pomegranate. It would have made sense for this foodstuff to be truly evil—a meat object, such as a beefsteak. Why then a Fruit? Because our Ancestors were fruitivores, without a doubt, and only a Fruit would have tempted them.”

Yet at the same time, they’re a semi-serious call to care about the environment, to honor all God’s creation as a reflection of the divine. Their rooftop Eden and bad vegan cooking won’t save the world. Still, Adam One believes they “must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there’s nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.”

An apocalyptic warning about the depletion of the earth is not what one might expect from Atwood, but she’s already shown herself to be a writer of many talents. Her settings have ranged from the 19th-century Canadian frontier (“Alias Grace”) to a Caribbean island in political turmoil (“Bodily Harm”). Power relations and politics are always themes in her fiction, sometimes in the foreground, sometimes as a backdrop to her favorite subject, strained power relations between men and women, adults and children. Familiar Atwood concerns turn up in “The Year of the Flood”: self-deception, rivalry between women, the bullying of girls by other girls. By the end of the book there are only a handful of people left in the world, yet they can’t let go of such old human habits as wanting to be found attractive. Atwood’s affection for her very human characters adds more layers to the book’s thematic richness.

“The Year of the Flood” has a narrative pattern typical of highly plotted, high-action novels: slow buildup, brief period of feverish action, sudden stop. But if the story is occasionally uneven, It doesn’t matter. This messy work of action-adventure philosophy is the most enjoyable novel Atwood has written in years. A third book is said to be in the works. I wonder what fresh thrills Atwood will get out of the advice to cultivate your garden.

Patron Saint of the Raised Eyebrow
The poet, essayist, and fiction writer Margaret Atwood (Ottawa, 1939) has not, in the past, been a fan of religion. Her 1985 novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” in particular portrayed fundamentalist Christianity as an enemy of women’s rights.
Her new novel, however, features heroes who are members of a Christian environmentalist movement and includes a number of their sermons, religious teachings, and amateurish hymns. Atwood’s publicity tour has taken on the atmosphere of a hippie religious revival, with a choir singing the hymns of “God’s Gardeners,” actors reading the parts of the characters, and the writer herself dancing up the aisle.

Does she mean it? In an interview in the Telegraph (UK), she speculated that religion might give humans some evolutionary advantages. ‘‘We seem to be hard-wired to have a belief system of some kind.” An extensive reading list on her website yearoftheflood.com includes such titles as “The Green Bible,” a Bible with all the passages that emphasize God’s care for creation highlighted in green ink. Yet she also seems to be doing all this with one eyebrow slightly raised, suggesting that Atwood the cynic hasn’t entirely converted into Atwood the believer.

Trouw, October 3, 2009. Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood (New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2009).