Pittsburgh Alpha to Omega

Zeb drove slowly, passing families of pleeblanders seated at the picnic tables with their barbecues going full blast.  Rowdy groups of pleebrats were drinking and messing around.  A rock bounced off the truck: the Heritage Parkies weren’t armed, and the pleebrats knew that.  There’d been swarmings and even fatalities, Zeb told her.  Something about a bunch of trees made people think they could cut loose.  “Wherever there’s Nature, there’s assholes,” he said cheerfully.

Margaret Atwood does dystopia real nice.  The Year of the Flood is a coquel or companion novel or, as Orson Scott Card uses the term, parallel novel to 2003′s Oryx and Crake… and it’s awesome.  I recommend reading both, in either order.

Rating: 5/5 stars

The Year of the Flood tells the stories of two women, Toby and Ren, from their childhoods in a near-future corporatocracy to their adventures after an apocalyptic plague, focusing mainly on the time both spent as members of the eco-religious group God’s Gardeners.  The Gardeners, whose founder Adam One helps his flock survive off the grid and prepare for the prophesied Waterless Flood, are often portrayed critically, highlighting the authoritarian qualities of organized religion; but as a quasi-Luddite anarchist agnostic/gnostic (depending which side of the bed I woke up on), I sympathized with them more often than not, as I suspect Atwood did in writing of them.  Each chapter begins with a brief sermon by Adam One,

The Fruit remains a deeply meaningful symbol to us, embodying the notions of healthful harvest, of rich culmination, and of new beginning, for within every Fruit is a seed – a potential new life.  The Fruit ripens and falls and returns to the soil; but the Seed takes root, and grows, and brings forth more Life.  As the Human Words of God have said, “By their Fruits ye shall know them.”  Let us pray that our Fruits be Fruits of Good, and not Fruits of Evil.

But a word of caution: we honour the Pollinating Insects, and in especial the Bees, but we are now informed that, in addition to the virus-resistant strain introduced after the recent honeybee die-off, the Corps have now developed a hybrid bee.  It is not a genetic splice, my Friends.  No: it is a greater abomination!  Bees are seized while still in larval form, and micro-mechanical systems are inserted into them.  Tissue grows around the insert, and when the full adult or “imago” emerges, it is a bee cyborg spy controllable by a CorpSeCorps operator, equipped to transmit, and thus to betray.

The ethical problems raised are troubling: Should we have recourse to insecticides?  Is such a mechanized slave bee alive?  If so, is it a true Creature of God or something else entirely?  We must ponder the deeper implications, my Friends, and pray for guidance.

Let us sing.

then a William Blake-inspired hymn from the Gardener Oral Hymnbook re: the Feast Day on which the chapter takes place,

OH LORD, YOU KNOW OUR FOOLISHNESS

Oh Lord, You know our foolishness,

And all our silly deeds;

You watch us scamper here and there,

Pursuing useless greeds.

We sometimes doubt that You are Love,

And we forget to thank;

We find the Sky an empty void,

The Universe a blank.

We fall into despondency,

And curse the hour that bore us;

We either claim You don’t exist,

Or else that You ignore us.

So pardon us these vacant moods,

Our dour and gloomy sayings;

Today we own ourselves Your Fools,

And celebrate by playing.

We make a full acknowledgment

Of all in us that’s vain –

Our petty strifes and tiny woes,

Our self-inflicted pain.

At April Fish we jest and sing

And laugh with childish glee;

We puncture pomp and puffed-up pride,

And smile at all we see.

Your starry World’s beyond our thought,

And wondrous without measure;

We pray, among Your Treasures bright,

Your Fools You’ll also treasure.

then the chapter, alternating from Ren (1st person) to Toby (3rd person) in the post-Flood present.  Toby is hunkered down in a luxury spa, where she subsists on avocado facial cream and other edible beauty products, Ren literally trapped in one room of a sex club catering to Corps big shots (like Jimmy and Glenn from Oryx and Crake), both unaware of the other’s, or indeed anyone else’s, survival.  From this vantage, episodes from the pasts of Ren

The first morning at that school was very strange.  I felt as if the classes were in a foreign language.  All the subjects were different, the words were different, and then there were the computers and the paper notebooks.  I had a built-in fear of those: it seemed so dangerous, all that permanent writing that your enemies could find – you couldn’t just wipe it away, not like a slate.  I wanted to run into the washroom and wash my hands after touching the keyboards and pages; the danger had surely rubbed off on me.

and of Toby

The kids were only seven or eight, but there were a lot of them, and when they spotted her they stopped yelling at one another and started yelling at her.  Goddie goddie, whitey bitch!  Get her shoes!

She swiveled so her back was against a wall and prepared to fend them off.  It was difficult to kick them really hard when they were that young – as Zeb had pointed out in his Urban Bloodshed Limitation class, there was a species inhibition against hurting children – but she knew she’d have to, because they could be deadly.  They’d aim for her stomach, ram her with their little heads, try to pull her down.  The smaller ones had a nasty habit of hoisting the Gardener women’s baggy skirts and diving in under them, then biting whatever they could find once they were in there.  But she was ready for them: when they got close enough, she’d twist their ears or chop their necks with the side of her hand, or bang two of their little skulls together.

unfold, recounting the events of a given pre-Flood Feast Day.  Atwood gracefully weaves, and builds dramatic tension across, these threads, merrily fleshing out the details of her future world as she goes, with proprietary splices (rakunks, pigoons, liobams and so forth), vicious veterans of the Painball arena (including Toby’s nemesis, her old boss from the corpse-grinding SecretBurger), and blue-skinned Crakers (posthumans designed by Glenn in Oryx and Crake) roaming the otherwise depopulated wilderness.

The Year of the Flood, like Oryx and Crake, may put off some (especially non-SF) readers with its apparently confusing structure and Atwood’s fondness for colons, semicolons and cutesy neologisms; as I told one pal who struggled to get into, but ended up really digging, Oryx and Crake recently: hang in there!  The stories Atwood tell in these novels are worth any initial frustration, and they rank among the finest works of dystopian literature ever written I’ve ever read.

According to this interview, Atwood is working on the third book in the “series”, to be called MaddAddam.

Should be rad.

Happy reading and cuídate.