The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

Read for: The Canadian Books Challenge

I find the more Atwood I read, the more I appreciate her writing.  Sometimes I don’t love the plot but her writing is brilliant.  If you’ve read Oryx and Crake you might recognize the setting and some of the characters in this novel.  It took me a really long time to clue into this though.  I did read Oryx and Crake right when it first came out so it’s been a while.

In this novel, there’s been a supervirus (the waterless flood) that’s spread through out a large majority of the population.  The story is told through two of the survivors, Ren and Toby who have managed to avoid the plague by being isolated from the general population.  Through flashbacks we learn that Toby and Ren were once part of the same religious group – called the Gardeners – and have since left for various reasons.  Eventually, Ren and Toby are forced to leave their respective hideouts and they are able to find others from their pasts and eventually each other.

I really liked this novel.  I sometimes have a hard time reading dystopian literature because it can be so disturbingly accurate.  Somehow this one didn’t get to me the way others have. (And not because it’s unrealistic.  Maybe I’m just becoming desensitized to it because I’ve read so much lately!)  With people making such a big deal over the swine flu and a possible pandemic it becomes a lot more real to read about a virus that killed huge portions of the population.

The characters in the book were likable and realistic.  It was really interesting to read how Toby viewed  Ren after they were reunited and see how different it was of Ren’s own view of herself.  I think this is quite often true in the real world.  How we see ourselves can be very different from how others view us.

I have a really hard time writing reviews of Atwood’s work because there is so much to talk about that I just don’t know where to start.  I also feel like I don’t want to give away too much of the story because it’s so much better to read it without knowing what’s coming next.  So for those reasons I think I’ll stop now.  Just read the book yourself!  It’s good.