A near-unique event at our meeting this month – the 10 of us didn’t just like The Year of the Flood, we loved it!
We particularly liked the character of Toby (although we felt that many of the male characters were not so well drawn or sympathetic, except perhaps Zeb) and also felt it was very much a story about friendship, particularly between Toby and Ren, and the lengths to which people will go in the name of friendship. We liked the story-telling and descriptions of the world as it had become (although it was noted that there’s less description and scientific detail in The Year of the Flood than its earlier companion piece, Oryx and Crake). Many details were chilling, from the wider issues of commercialisation, the idea of governments being superseded not by corporations but security services and sex being seen as a commodity, to Toby’s ongoing fear of Blanco. There was much admiration for the sheer scale of the imaginative details and moral issues raised within such a compelling story.
We discussed the Gardeners at some length. They were not popular with everyone and we thought that they were not necessarily held up as paragons or an alternative ideal society, but nonetheless we felt they were benign, even honourable in their intentions, and found much to admire about them. Adam One’s sermons and the following hymns were boring to some, whereas others enjoyed them. We found humour in the sermons, and also noted how they reflected the Gardeners’ move from idealists to survivalists. A minor quibble was reluctantly brought up – it seemed implausible that nearly all the people in the story were either Toby and Ren’s friends or their enemies.
We briefly looked at Oryx and Crake, which tells the same overall story but from different points of view (specifically male rather than female as in Flood) and ends in the same place in the story as Flood. Several members who hadn’t already read Oryx and Crake were now planning to do so, and we all were all left hoping that having looked at this story twice, Atwood might just do a third book, moving the story onwards. We also touched on the debate as to whether The Year of the Flood should be seen as “speculative fiction” as Atwood prefers, or “science fiction” – this proved quite as contentious here as in other forums! A couple of other books were also mentioned for their similar post-apocalyptic setting – Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio.
Our appetite for science (/speculative) fiction had clearly been well and truly whetted, and although we had some really interesting titles put forward for our July book, we overwhelmingly voted for HG Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come, but thanks to everyone who put forward their choices. Our next book is The Help, set in Mississippi in 1962 it explores the black / white social divide, in a story told through the voices of three very different women – see you on 8th June!
Cathy
