The flood referred to by the title of Margaret Atwood’s new novel isn’t the biblical deluge, sent by God to wipe out wickedness and sin, but a waterless one: an uncommon pandemic that cannot be contained by “biotools and bleach,” and that sweeps “through the air as if on wings,” burning “through cities like fire, spreading germ-ridden mobs, terror and butchery.” This flood has killed millions upon millions, and electrical, digital and industrial systems are failing, as their human keepers die.
In The Year of the Flood we are transported to a world that is part Hieronymus Bosch, part A Clockwork Orange. “Total breakdown” is upon the land, and a private security firm named CorpsSeCorps has seized power, taking control where the local police forces have collapsed from lack of financing. The Corps people not only use brutal tactics like internal rendition to enforce their will, but they are also conducting sinister experiments, monkeying with human and animal genetics and creating strange new mutant species.
A kind of companion piece to her lumpy 2003 novel, Oryx and Crake, this book takes us back to that post-apocalyptic future and it does so with a lot more energy, inventiveness and narrative panache.
Like Oryx and the author’s 1986 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, this is another dystopian fantasy that’s meant to be a sort of cautionary tale about the wrongs and excesses of our own world — be it antifeminism, denial of global warming, or violence and materialism. But while those earlier books were hobbled by didactic asides and a preachy, moralistic tone, Atwood has loosened up in this volume and given her imagination free rein. Having already mapped out the basic geography of her futuristic world in Oryx, she dispenses here with exposition and focuses on her two heroines’ efforts to survive in the wake of the Waterless Flood.
One woman, Toby, has survived inside an upscale spa, where she subsists on supplies from a storeroom and the garden, where they used to grow vegetables for customers’ organic salads. She eventually ventures out, journeying back to her parents’ old neighborhood to find a rifle she’d buried under some patio stones. Her father had used the rifle to commit suicide, after his wife died of a mysterious illness that consumed all their savings.
Toby later learns that her mother was most likely a guinea pig for a drug company named HelthWyzer that was “seeding folks with illnesses” via souped-up supplement pills — “using them as free lab animals, then collecting on the treatments for those very same illnesses.”
After her parents’ death, Toby is forced to take a series of demeaning jobs, culminating in her employment at a revolting fast-food chain called SecretBurgers, which is rumored to run human corpses through its meat grinders. There, she becomes the sexual toy of a violent, piggish manager named Blanco — until she is unexpectedly rescued by a group of demonstrators known as God’s Gardeners, a hippielike sect pledged to preserve all animal and plant life. Over the years Toby will rise through the ranks of the Gardeners and eventually become one of their elders.
When she realizes that she is one of the few survivors of the Waterless Flood, Toby wonders why she was chosen: “Why has she been saved alive? Out of the countless millions. Why not someone younger, someone with more optimism and fresher cells? She ought to trust that she’s here for a reason — to bear witness, to transmit a message, to salvage at least something from the general wreck. She ought to trust, but she can’t.”
Among the other people living with God’s Gardeners is a girl named Ren, who has been brought there by her mother. Ren will later be taken back to the HelthWyzer compound, where she falls in love with Jimmy — the hero of Oryx and Crake, also known as Snowman — who will break her heart by taking up with her best friend, Amanda.
After her biofather is kidnapped, Ren winds up working as a trapeze dancer at a sex club named Scales and Tails — one of her teachers actually recommends it as a good job with health benefits and a dental plan — and it is there, in an isolation room, that Ren will wait out the Waterless Flood.
Although some of the chapters in this book start with annoying passages detailing the Gardeners’ ecological credo, Atwood largely refrains from the sort of proselytizing that tarnished her earlier ventures into science fiction. By focusing on her characters and their perilous journeys through a nightmare world, she has succeeded in writing a gripping and visceral book that showcases the pure storytelling talents she displayed with such verve in her 2000 novel, The Blind Assassin.
Sept.16 to Sept. 22 The “anti-communist train” with then-president Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) face plastered on the engine puffed along the “sugar railway” (糖業鐵路) in May 1955, drawing enthusiastic crowds at 103 stops covering nearly 1,200km. An estimated 1.58 million spectators were treated to propaganda films, plays and received free sugar products. By this time, the state-run Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台糖, Taisugar) had managed to connect the previously separate east-west lines established by Japanese-era sugar factories, allowing the anti-communist train to travel easily from Taichung to Pingtung’s Donggang Township (東港). Last Sunday’s feature (Taiwan in Time: The sugar express) covered the inauguration of the
The corruption cases surrounding former Taipei Mayor and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) head Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are just one item in the endless cycle of noise and fuss obscuring Taiwan’s deep and urgent structural and social problems. Even the case itself, as James Baron observed in an excellent piece at the Diplomat last week, is only one manifestation of the greater problem of deep-rooted corruption in land development. Last week the government announced a program to permit 25,000 foreign university students, primarily from the Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia, to work in Taiwan after graduation for 2-4 years. That number is a
In a stark demonstration of how award-winning breakthroughs can come from the most unlikely directions, researchers have won an Ig Nobel prize for discovering that mammals can breathe through their anuses. After a series of tests on mice, rats and pigs, Japanese scientists found the animals absorb oxygen delivered through the rectum, work that underpins a clinical trial to see whether the procedure can treat respiratory failure. The team is among 10 recognized in this year’s Ig Nobel awards (see below for more), the irreverent accolades given for achievements that “first make people laugh, and then make them think.” They are not
This Qing Dynasty trail takes hikers from renowned hot springs in the East Rift Valley, up to the top of the Coastal Mountain Range, and down to the Pacific Short vacations to eastern Taiwan often require choosing between the Rift Valley with its pineapple fields, rice paddies and broader range of amenities, or the less populated coastal route for its ocean scenery. For those who can’t decide, why not try both? The Antong Traversing Trail (安通越嶺道) provides just such an opportunity. Built 149 years ago, the trail linked up these two formerly isolated parts of the island by crossing over the Coastal Mountain Range. After decades of serving as a convenient path for local Amis, Han settlers, missionaries and smugglers, the trail fell into disuse once modern roadways were built