The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood


A new Atwood novel is always an exciting moment, and I was surprised to realise how long it had been since the last one, which was Oryx and Crake in 2003. Oh, she’s published a lot of books since then, but none of them were what you would call a ‘full’ novel. Retellings of ancient myths, poetry, short stories, non-fiction – all fine, but not long-form fiction, which is what I enjoy. I have fond memories of Oryx and Crake, which turn out not to be as precise as I had hoped, so I jumped on this as soon as it arrived. It didn’t hurt that The Year of the Flood is post-apocalyptic fiction, which I enjoy anyway, and which Atwood is very good at. It turns out that this is a sort-of sequel to Oryx, although it took me an awfully long time to work that out. I had thought that my feelings of familiarity were just caused by awareness of Atwood’s other work, her writing style and so on, but it turned out that some characters are shared between the two books. I’d have to go back to the previous novel to really put my finger on the connections, and I would suggest that – unless you have a fantastic memory – it might be worth going back and rereading that novel, if only because I’m sure that I missed some subtleties that may have enhanced the reading experience.

So with that caveat in place, and with an attempt not to give away too much of the plot, how does Flood stand up? I have no doubt that Atwood fans will enjoy it – she is on form here – but I suspect the wider reading populace may be left a little cold. In many ways it feels like a (very well done) pastiche of an Atwood novel. That could sound like an insult, but it isn’t meant to be – I’m just trying to get across the fact that this didn’t feel overly new or fresh. Of course, with hindsight that feeling came, at least in part, from the fact that I had encountered this world before, and some of its inhabitants. Setting isn’t everything, naturally, and neither is constant evolution of style – and Atwood has more than proved her ability to flit between genres – but I couldn’t initially shake my slight disappointment.

It probably didn’t help that it takes the plot a while to get going, and Atwood has decided on a flashback structure that takes away some of the tension of her situations. We know that two women are going to survive the coming catastrophe, and end up isolated in separate locations. The novel relies on our interest being held by the description of how they end up there, with a vague promise of continuing the narrative once the flashbacks have caught up with the opening chapters. Thankfully (and unsurprisingly) Atwood’s writing is up to the task, and her habit of jumping back and forth between characters and timeframes serves the plot well. It takes a while to fit all of the jigsaw pieces together, to begin to build up an image of the society and culture she has created, but even the blurry picture intrigues. There’s a bit of a mystery rumbling along in the background – what caused the catastrophe? – and even the minor characters are defined with a casual simplicity. Some of the set-pieces are truly exciting or scary, and the sense of a persecuted minority struggling to survive, let alone stay within their self-imposed ecological lifestyles, is well conveyed.

So it was enjoyable, but I did find it hard to get truly involved. As the strands of the novel began to come together, however, my attention began to be properly caught. We knew that our two narrators were going to survive the end of the world, holed up in their separate structures, and Atwood’s smattering of chapters set in the aftermath promised some kind of resolution to their stories. Once the flashbacks had been dispensed with (which, to be fair, wasn’t for quite a while) I began to be more excited about the plot of the book, rather than just admiring of the skill with which Atwood was telling her story. There was more of a sense of danger for the main characters – we knew they’d survive the apocalypse, but had no such guarantees now – and more of a feel of narrative possibility. Despite that, I did feel that the ending fizzled out a bit. Hard to put a finger on why, exactly, but perhaps it was the inevitability of things. Once you’ve wiped out most of the human population, there isn’t a lot left to be done.

Overall, then, I had mixed feelings about the whole thing (as if I hadn’t made that obvious!). It’s classic Atwood, which can only be a good thing, but there was just a little too much familiarity and security for me to be truly happy with the book. I enjoyed the time I spent with the characters, and there’s no doubt that Atwood has as fertile imagination as ever. Her prose is always good, and there were moments that stood out as funny, scary or clever. The latter sections of the book provide some real suspense, and her ecological warnings are even more relevant than they were with the previous book. The book is well worth reading, but it isn’t her best.

I started this early in June, and finished it on holiday, on the 6th June. It comes out in September, ISBN: 0747585164.