When Margaret Atwood’s 2003 novel Oryx and Crake ended, the Crakers had encountered two men and a woman. Snowman, back from his foraging trip at RejoovenEsense, went after them. Though he caught up with them and observed them sitting around a campfire from behind a bush, we never found out who these people were, and whether or not Snowman tried to make contact.
Now we know.
Atwood’s latest novel The Year of the Flood tells the story of other humans who survived the Crake-made Armageddon, particularly Ren and Toby, members of the religious cult the Gardeners who had long foreseen the flood. Through a series of long flashbacks, The Year of the Flood describes their lives before the flood, bringing readers up to speed with how they managed to survive said flood. The present-tense action truly begins on page 315, only to end abruptly—as abruptly and as open-ended as Oryx and Crake—a hundred pages later.
When Atwood decided, for the first time in her long-standing career, to write a sequel, she fell victim to the same disease that affected the Wachowski brothers. Though I don’t usually suffer from Matrix Syndrome (an instinctive and unfounded hatred of any replacement, sequel etc. which fails to fill the immense shoes of its predecessor), I can’t help but feel that The Year of the Flood is just filler. When readers (and movie-goers) encounter a creative new reality that resonates with them, they want to know more. But adding more to a brilliant, fascinating world usually dilutes it.
The reality Atwood created in Oryx and Crake was truly imaginative and scary because it was all very probable. As Atwood herself said, she didn’t invent anything, every technology she mentions already exists. In The Year of the Flood, we’re served so much more of that reality that we feel full and will probably refuse the next serving that will (alas) undoubtedly come.
While Oryx and Crake balanced the present tense and flashbacks perfectly, The Year of the Flood is almost exclusively in flashbacks, giving the feeling that no story is evolving. In fact, the fascinating world seems to trump the story entirely. Furthermore, the story lines of both books meet at times (e.g., Ren meets Jimmy and Glenn at school), but sometimes the timeline seems off. For example, in Oryx and Crake, Jimmy’s mother leaves when he’s in school, but in The Year of the Flood, she seems to have left when he’s in college.
In the end, we do find out who the two men and the woman are. We also find out if Snowman reaches out to them or not. The Year of the Flood does bring us to that point, then a little further, then nothing. All we really wanted to know at the end of Oryx and Crake is in the last fifteen pages of the novel.
Mélanie Grondin is a writer and translator living on the south shore of Montreal. Her prose and poetry have appeared in carte blanche, Soliloquies, Headlight Anthology, Room Magazine and Nashwaak Review.
