Year of The Flood

    This book is told from the perspective of  two women who both were members of a religious cult called the God's Gardeners. Like Jimmy in Oryx and Crake the character's life story is described all the way from early childhood in the same flashback format of the first book.   

God's Gardeners

     The God's Gardeners are a new religious movement founded by Adam One, spiritual leader of the group and charismatic street prophet. Basically they are a super-hippy version of a Tolstoyan commune. They begin on an expansive rooftop garden in one of the most poor pleeblands and squat nearby abandoned buildings. All of their food is grown on the garden and everything else they have is dumpstered. Members are all strict vegans who try not to harm any animal life, even of insect pests. This element was an interesting take on Ahimsa from the Jain religion of India. The book follows the progression of the religion with short chapters that begin with a speech by Adam One and ends with a hymn from The God's Gardeners Oral Hymnbook, which was actually put to music. We learn in the final sermon by Adam One that although the God's Gardeners survive the initial epidemic, which they see as a biblical "waterless flood" sent to purify the Earth, infected survivors later bring them into contact with the virus and kill them all.

     Ren was brought to the Garden by her mother, who like Jimmy's mother left her comfortable life in the compound. Unlike Jimmy's mother she left for personal reasons. She had fallen in love with Zeb, a hardened but dashing eco-warrior who later causes a schism in the God's Gardeners as those who push for more active resistance split off to strike civilization with engineered bio-weapons. After having relationship problems with Zeb she decides to go back to the compound with Ren. Ren has at this point spent most of her life at the Garden and resents her mother for taking her away from it, and also misses her best friend Amanda, a Texan refugee who also survived the flood.

      Ren's family later moves her again to another compound and is put in the same high school as Jimmy and Glenn. Although Ren's relationship to Jimmy is only briefly mentioned in Oryx and Crake it was an extremely important part of Ren's life and she keeps thinking about Jimmy and if he has survived throughout the whole book. I thought that discrepancy was pretty strange and even thought that maybe Margaret Atwood hadn't even planned that from the beginning. At this school she also spends time with Glenn, but he remains just as mysterious as in Oryx and Crake.

      Toby is much older than Ren, and was one of her teachers back at the Garden. After being ruthlessly exploited by the corporations she joins the God's Gardeners out of desperation. They first kill her mother by using her as an unknowing guinea pig for freshly made microbes, which drives her father to suicide. At this point she is destitute and is given a job at a disgusting burger chain called SecretBurger (because the meat is secret) where she is preyed upon by her mafioso boss. This is where Adam One storms in and gives Toby a chance to join the God's Gardeners.

      Although they did save her and she is grateful, Toby never really made any decisions to stay in the group entirely on her free will. Not only did she not have much of a choice to leave SecretBurger, but the group emotionally manipulates her into becoming a full fledged member. She realizes it though and the reader can tell she holds a lot of deep down resentment of the group for it, even though she loves her fellow gardeners. 

     

     Adam One

        Now, I realize that they are kinda culty, but I would totally join them if they existed. People always hate on being a hippy, but it looks like loads of fun. Farming and gathering is a blast, you get to meet lots of pretty hippy girls, everybody is pretty healthy in general, and regular social standards of hygiene and nudity are relaxed.

      Year of the Flood seemed way more plausible than Oryx and Crake, solely because in the 6 years difference between the books so much real world technological "progress" has been made. For example, video cell phones are used in this book all the time while they weren't in Oryx and Crake. Overall the science they have is more in line with the trajectory that technology is taking today. The fact that it can be so different in just 6 years is an implicit, unintentional message in itself that this future really could happen. That is in line with Atwood's assertion that the novels aren't really science fiction, but speculative fiction.
 
      Despite being about religion, YoTF lost a lot of the biblical feel that made Oryx and Crake so good. I think what made it lose its epic qualities is its focus on the God's Gardeners community rather than a single individual. The brutality of Snowman's loneliness and diminishing sanity gave Oryx and Crake an edge that YoTF couldn't match. That isn't to say YoTF wasn't brutal. It was just as full of awful violence and crimes against nature as Oryx and Crake was, if not more so.

     A warning to those who want to read the trilogy: It will make you pretty miserable. And its not just because of the non-stop violence and tragedy, because you can expect that in a book about a biopunk corporate dystopia leading to total environmental collapse. What is most depressing is the complete lack of emotional depth in the characters. I can see why a lot of people wouldn't like the series for this reason, but I loved it. The lack of emotion was a very conscious decision by Margaret Atwood to put the focus of the story on morality.

     Overall, I enjoyed these books and im pretty excited for the last of the series, Maddaddam. I'm most interested in the story line's present and what will happen to the children of Crake. I also hope that the pigoons will play a larger part in the story, considering we don't know how smart they really are.What I would love most of all is for the third to have some parts from the perspective of Crake or at least anything that digs more into his motivations. Realistically though, it will focus on Zeb (who goes by the codename Maddaddam) and the other active resistors. I loved the kinds of bio-attacks they were mentioned using in this book, like microbes that cause asphalt roads to swell and puff out like marshmallows all over the southwest and mice that are compelled to chew through the engine belts of cars. I'm definitely most sympathetic to the Maddaddamites and can't wait for the new book.