The Year of the Flood

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood's new novel is set in the same imaginary space as Oryx and Crake but told from the point of view of a minor character in the first book and of a senior member of the religious group "Gods Gardeners," mentioned only in passing in the first book. The Year of the Flood gives a rounder, fuller view of the imaginary but plausible future that Atwood has created for us. Having read Oryx and Crake first, it was easier for me to follow, although I think it would be a less confusing read, even without knowing the basic premise from the start.

Atwood has extrapolated on climate change, genetic engineering, privatization of government functions and corporate irresponsibility and immunity, all trends we can see today, to create the distopian future of The Year of the Flood. Her two narrators are Ren, the former girlfriend of Jimmy, aka Snowman from Oryx and Crake and Toby, a senior member of God's Gardeners. Gods Gardeners are an eco-religious communal group, growing there own food in a rooftop garden on top of one of the buildings they occupy in the middle of the urban chaos of a "plebe," the word Atwood uses to describe a city outside of the walled and gated communities where the wealthy corporate executives live, under the protection of CorpSeCorps, the Corporate Security Corps, which has become the privatized police, army, courts and prison administration of Atwood's unnamed future nation.

 In the future world Atwood has created, large corporations, many of them in the business of bio-engineering, run everything. These corporations are answerable to no one. They create and spread new diseases in order to sell the cures they have made for them. They build new creatures, combining the genetic materials of different species. Many technologies of energy efficiency are used, but were unsuccessful in reversing the trend of global warming. Solar provides the electricity for many building which are off the grid, biomass is rendered to make a petroleum substitute. Organized crime is rampant in the plebelands and regularly uses these rendering devices to dispose of bodies, or just takes their saleable organs and leaves them in a vacant lot.

Atwood goes to some length fleshing out God's Gardeners, their theology and rituals, including the words to  hymns, which end each chapter. There is a CD of these songs available through Atwood's website. One amusing aspect is their saints days. Like Roman Catholicism, Gods Gardeners structure their calendar around a list of saints. Francis of Assisi is one, but most are people like Rachel Carson, Al Gore and Jacques Cousteau.  Euell Gibbons gets a whole week.

Through the stories told by Ren and Toby, Atwood fills in the missing parts of Oryx and Crake. We learn that there is a connection between God's Gardeners and MaddAdam, the online game/eco-terrorist group and that Glenn/Crake, who formed MaddAdam and created the plague, known to the Gardeners as the Waterless Flood, was inspired by the Gardener's doomsday prophecy to create the plague and the genetically altered post-humans that he believes should inherit the Earth from us.

The end of The Year of the Flood coincides with the end of Oryx and Crake, leaving Toby, Ren, Ren's friend Amanda a couple of sociopathic criminals and a colony of blue bellied post-humans to fend for themselves.  How will society evolve from here? Is Atwood so enamored of this particular distopia that she would write a trilogy? Perhaps she means to leave it up to the reader's imagination. It would be nice to know what happens next in the lives of the well crafted characters left stranded on the beach at the end, but I think that the speculative propositions presented in the two books have been played out. Going further, to see whether traditional humans or the new blue-bellies will inherit the Earth, or perhaps the pigoons, would be a venture too far into science fiction for Margaret Atwood's taste.

Book Review Blog Carnival the 33rd Edition

Due to a series of unfortunate events, not attributable to Lemony Snicket, I am posting the 33rd edition of the Book Review Blog Carnival here, on my own book review blog - a day late and a dollar short. While you are here you might want to click on the little MP3 player icon over in the sidebar and listen to the new recording I made of Jimmy Durante's song which I named this blog after. Please visit and leave comments on some of the many blogs that have submitted book reviews to this carnival.

Without further ado, here is the 33rd Book Review Blog Carnival.

fiction

Jim Murdoch at The Truth About Lies, has written a review of The Invisible City by Emili Rosales. Jim says "The narrator receives an old manuscript about an ambitious project dreamt up by King Charles III. The manuscript contains hints about a lost masterpiece by the Venetian painter Tiepolo, and the site of the Invisible City is where he used to play as a child. The Invisible City is a gripping historical mystery and a compelling examination of the forces of power and love."

KerrieS reviewed  Executive Lunch by Maria E. Schneider at MYSTERIES in PARADISE. "This is the first time I have reviewed a book you can only buy as an e-book. crime fiction, with a larger than life heroine Sedona O'Hala, offered the chance to try an executive lifestyle in return for catching some thieves."

KerrieS also reviewed If the Dead Rise Not by Philip Kerr posted at MYSTERIES in PARADISE. "Crime fiction set in Berlin in 1934, in a Nazi Germany hoping to host the Olympics in 1936."

Stephen Shaw of Craving Books has reviewed The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood."The Year of the Flood" is fine literary speculative fiction." I can't read his review because I'm in the middle of reading the book - one of my silly rules.

Stephen Shaw compares In a Perfect World by Laura Kasischke, to The Year of the Flood which he calls "Romantic and haunted."

A.F. Heart writes about Knockout by Catherine Coulter   at Mysteries and My Musings. "13th in the FBI Thriller series opens with FBI Agent Dillon Savich as a customer in a bank when it gets robbed. It is a gripping read from the first sentence with two plot lines."

A.F. Heart also reviewed Sand Sharks by Margaret Maron. "#15 in Deborah Knott Mysteries. While at a legal conference, Judge Knott finds the body of a fellow judge and investigates."

Nymeth reviewed In the Time of Butterflies by Julia Alvarez, at things mean a lot."In the Time of Butterflies is a fictionalized account of the lives of the Mirabal sisters. In the 1950's, the sisters opposed the regime of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, and as a result three of the four were murdered."

Surbhi Bhatia reviewed A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce at The Viewspaper.

Surbhi Bhatia reviewed A Case of Exploding Mangoes also at The Viewspaper .

Siddharth Garud, at Indian Eagle's Diary, presents 2 States by Chetan Bhagat.

emancave reviewed The Law of Nines by Terry Goodkind at e-ManCave.com.

Sarah at SmallWorld Reads reviews The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver posted. It's in my to be read pile. Guess I'll skip this one, too.

children's books

Jeanne of Necromancy Never Pays, host of our last carnival, reviewed The Box of Delights "This is a book for all ages, particularly good for reading out loud on dark December evenings."

non fiction

Serena presents New Rules for Mortgages at Taylor-Brown Real Estate Talks.

Sparky Bates read Predictably Irrational - by Dan Ariely and reviewed it at Accidental Reads.

Rick Sincere brings us some holiday cheer with Christmas Carols: The Odd and the New at Rick Sincere News and Thoughts, saying, "A review of "The Daily Telegraph Book of Carols," by Ian Bradley"

BWL found a great sounding title: How to Smell a Rat by Ken Fisher. Read about it at Christian Personal Finance.

jim presents Frequent Flyer Master at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity.

Effortless Abundance reviewed The Soul Truth  bu Shiela and Marcus Gillette at Effortless Abundance.

Susan Gaissert wrote about The Accidental American on her blog at My Political Side. "This is an excellent book about immigration from the viewpoint of immigrants who exemplify the American dream and American values."


Jim Murdoch must be talking about me in his review of Whiffling in Liff or what to buy a constipated logophile for Xmas  at The Truth About Lies." Everyone who loves words loves books about all the weird and wonderful words there are out there that hardly ever get used: foreign expressions, colloquial terms, slang words, gobbledygook, technobabble, queer place names … and every year new books come out that collect these under various guises. A discussion of the work of Adam Jacot de Boinod with nods to Douglas Adams and the plethora of bathroom readers out there."

Terry Holliday reviewed Walking in This World - Starting Over by Julia Cameron at My Creativity Blog. Terry says "Terry Holliday begins a series of articles based on Julia Cameron's book titled, "Walking in This World". Terry challenges readers to work through all 12 weeks with her." Is she related to Bob Dole?

Rhiana read  Saving Ben by Dan E. Burns, PhD. Find out who Ben is at A Frugal Life - Just the Two of Us.

biography

Clark Bjorke, that's me, read Pops byTerry Teachout. My review is at I'll Never Forget the Day I Read a Book!. I have included some YouTube clips of Satch, so plan to spend some time with it.

Rod reviewed Andre Agassi's autobiography, Open on his blog Tennis Chump."Andre Agassi's book chronicles his journey of self-discovery and self-acceptance in transforming himself from the kid who hates tennis to one of the game's greatest ambassadors - well worth a read."

Border Songs

Jim Lynch

Brandon Vanderkool, the protagonist of Border Songs, has some of the symptoms of Asbergers Syndrome. He's six foot eight inches tall, a birder and an artist. He works for the border patrol along a section of the border between Washington State an British Colombia. He lives on the dairy farm where he grew up, with his parents and can look from there across the ditch which marks the border, to the home of the father of the Canadian girl that he is in love with. She is in the marijuana smuggling business.

Jim Lynch describes Brandon as dislexic, but I see borderline autism in his social ineptitude, his amazing attention to detail, his difficulty with filtering out stimuli. Because he must pay attention to everything at once, in detail, he "accidentally" captures smugglers, illegal aliens and terrorist suspects that others in the border patrol don't see. He also takes time in the middle of his work day to build giant bird's nests and release strings of sewn together leaves floating down a stream. Brandon paints portraits of all the people he catches crossing the border illegally. The characters in Border Songs are complex, well rounded and surprising. Brandon's mother is in the early stages of Alzheimers. His father has building a sailboat in a barn on the farm for years but he is running out of money. Wayne Rousseau smokes pot to help control the symptoms of MS. He also paints copies of Picasso's last painting and reinvents the light bulb, for the experience. Madeline Rousseau wants out of the drug business and becomes more and more entangled in it day by day.

There are several plot threads running through the book: Brandon's BP adventures, Brandon's art, Norm's troubles with the dairy farm and his sailboat, the pot growing and smuggling business, Wayne Rousseau's experiential experiments, Sophie Winslow's documentary film making or massage business or whatever it is she is really doing here anyhow, the ineptitude of the United States government. All of these themes are woven together in a way that makes the basic boy meets girl plot work very well indeed.

Border Songs is character driven. Each of these people becomes a real person that you want to know. What are these people like, rather than what happens next, is what kept my interest, reading late at night, when I had to get up to go to work in the morning. Be careful about that.

Hardly Knew Her

Laura Lippman

Hardly Knew Her is a collection of sixteen short stories and one novella by Baltimore's premier author of crime fiction. The stories tend to be about sex and murder. It's not a good thing in Lippman's universe to leave a woman unfulfilled, it can get you killed. Two of the stories involve Tess Monaghan, star of Lippman's detective story series. One of those is written in the form of an article in the "Beacon Light," the newspaper in Lippman's fictional Baltimore. It is an interview with Monaghan and her best bud, Whitney Talbot. Tess Monaghan fans must read it if they want to keep up with her life.

One short story, and the novella, feature Lippman's take on the "D.C. Madam." Her fictional character doesn't get caught and is very conscientious about providing her employees with security, health insurance and benefits. Lippman has carefully worked out her business plan. I suspect that we will see this character in a novel before long. The short story is not my favorite reading. Authors tend to get all cute and O. Henry when they write short stories, going for the surprise ending in a predictable way, rather like my book reviews. These stories are no different. After reading a dozen or so of them the reader is no longer surprised to learn that the perky suburban housewife has killed her husband. Lippman's stories are mostly mini murder mysteries with the mystery left out. They are mostly written from the point of view of the murderer, for brevity's sake. For all that, these are very readable stories.

I wonder if the books title is intended to evoke traditional Irish song Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye, from which When Johnny Comes Marching Home was derived. It is the title of one of the stories, of course and on the surface at least is derived from a rather poor one liner, "Poker? I hardly knew her." I like my reference better. It's more literary.

Book Review Blog Carnival # 32 is Posted

Necromancy Never Pays is our host this week. Stop by and visit. There are lots of reviews of lots of books of every kind.