Sarah read and liked Elizabeth's review of The Year of the Flood:

"Margaret Atwood does not write safe books. She doesn't write books that make you comfortable or happy or sure of yourself. She doesn't prop up her readers. She scares them. She freaks them out. She throws things at them. She plants rocks under the ma...more Margaret Atwood does not write safe books. She doesn't write books that make you comfortable or happy or sure of yourself. She doesn't prop up her readers. She scares them. She freaks them out. She throws things at them. She plants rocks under the mattress so you can't sleep. She leaves obstacles in your path that you will trip over, no matter how careful you are. That is, of course, why I love her. It's also why her books are only slightly more difficult to write about than they are to read.

They are hard to read. It's not just the detail of the language. She has this sharp style that snaps at you. She pinches. There you are, calmly reading along, and suddenly, she's describing a piece of finger found in a burger. It takes one sentence, but you are filled with a dozen horrible images, all worse than the last. But you get past it, hoping, that you aren't going to be smacked again, and things will go well from here. She doesn't go too far in descriptions of violence. She describes the sounds of sex; we don't have to see it to know what is going on (something a few other writers I shall not name could learn from). But within a few chapters you are totally captured into a not-quite-our world and not-quite-our-time and everything makes sense. Nose cones to protect you from the air. Sunblock and hats. Tainted food supplies. Corporations gaining more and more control. Sickening, real-feeling touches than make you uneasy about how close they are to how things are now.

She's not the only person to write fiction about possible, dystopian futures. She's written wonderful articles about the influence of George Orwell. She says she even manages to scare herself sometimes.

I think she does it because she's bored. She's written the present tense already and she has so many things she can say if she leaps forward just a few years. She can explore where all the trends might go. She can examine the language people use, such as the symbolism of the snake and the fruit in the garden, and the decline of language with increased texting. She can do it without being offensive because she's ahead in time. It's not quite real so she can be harsher than she could be in our current society/time. She can suggest people are being melted down for bio-fuel and food because it's not real (yet), but the part about the organ harvesting isn't her imagination getting away with her.

However skillfully she does all this; it's only one thing she felt like exploring here. She almost always writes about women* and how women respond to their situations, and, most importantly, their relationships to each other. It's fascinating for two reasons; the first being that she doesn't consider herself a feminist, and second being that she writes about women I don't particularly like. She creates real women in her books, to me, because I don't know who they are instantly. She is able to make me believe in someone I don't already understand. She creates mean girls. You remember the bully in your fourth grade class? The big, awkward one who everyone was afraid of? She's in here. Lots of authors create that bully, but they don't create the relationship. They don't look at the friendship with her and what happens when you grow out of it. Do you remember your relationship with her? I don't know any author who has told me more accurately about how girls can be cruel to each other, and how they remember it forever, than Atwood. There is an excellent examination of guilt, and how they carry it on and on, because of how self-centered girls are at that age. I have read non-fiction that doesn't do it as well as she does.

The book has flaws. I am not particularly interested in religious cults, particularly not pseudo-Christian ones, so while I was impressed that she created hymnals for her little cult, and based the style on William Blake, I was duly impressed by her intellectual ability, but I wasn't particularly interested. That she carried the conceit through to the end tended to drag on me. I also thought some of what she had included here, she'd done before, in her other books, and she was borrowing more than she should. I'm always willing to take another look at one of her themes with her, but sometimes it seemed like she was short-handing a little. It's hard for me to be critical of her. She is one of the few authors I will read the moment the book is published.

I am staggered at the complexity of this book. I noticed a lot of the reviews here started with a re-hash of the plot and then compared it to The Handmaid's Tale and talked about whether or not to read Oryx and Crake first, as if this were just a story, all surface, like a sci-fi series, like Fahrenheit 451 is about a guy who learns to read or Brave New World is about a country boy in the big city or Animal Farm is about a bunch of pigs. There are pigs here too...




* Oryx and Crake was the first departure. (less) "