The Year of the Flood is the sequel to Atwood’s 2003 novel Oryx and Crake. It was a long wait to find out about the mysterious people that Snowman/Jimmy saw on the beach at the end of his hazardous supply-run to his former compound, but one of the obvious advantages of reading these novels ‘in arrears’ so to speak is that they can be read without the long delays in between publication, keeping the details of the preceding books fresh in the mind.

However, the enigmatic end of O&C is not immediately resolved – the wait continues until near the end of this sequel. The Year of the Flood follows the story of two of ‘God’s Gardeners’, the millennial cult mentioned in O&C. God’s Gardeners believe that a biblical ‘waterless flood’ is coming, in which the world will be cleansed of the damage done by man. and of mankind itself, leaving only a small number of survivors who have prepared for the ‘flood’.

Prepping – ‘the practice of making active preparations for a possible catastrophic disaster or emergency, typically by stockpiling food, ammunition, and other supplies‘ – is now a fairly common concept if not practice, particularly after Covid, but I am not sure when it became mainstream. Regardless, God’s Gardeners are preppers, stashing away supplies in ‘arks’ in preparation for the coming imminent catastrophe. And they are as it turns out absolutely right to do so. Atwood’s sympathies seem clearly with those warning of the impending ecological disaster, even if it is probably too late to do anything to avoid it.

As the narrative develops we learn more about the God’s Gardeners’ beliefs – they are strict vegetarians and aim to live entirely self sufficiently while they await the expected end of the world, even though their origins are not fully explained until the third novel is the trilogy, MaddAddam. Sections of the novel are regularly interspersed with copies of sermons preached by Adam One, the God’s Gardeners leader and founder, and hymns which celebrate their endless round of festivals. The cult’s leadership council are all called Adam and Eve One, two, Three etc. We also learn that the group’s ideology is perhaps not as outlandish as we had originally been led to believe – their understanding of the likely coming apocalypse proves almost exactly right, and they develop an impressive range of survival skills. The community steadily grows as more people come to realise that the modern way of life is unsustainable.

Much of The Year of the Flood follows a similar time period and structure to Oryx and Crake, with a fresh perspective of the events leading up to the apocalypse and its aftermath from the point of view of the God’s Gardeners and in particular two of their surviving members, Toby and Ren. As with O&C much of the novel is told in flashback. Toby (confusingly, a young woman) works as a ‘meat barista’ in a burger bar, enticingly named SecretBurgers. As we know from O&C law and order has largely broken down in the world outside the corporation compounds, so when Toby is assaulted by her manager, the psychotic Blanco, she is unable to do much about it until the God’s Gardeners rescue her and take her to their commune.

The other parallel thread of the story is told by Ren, a child member of the group, whose mother Lucerne is an escapee from one of the corporation compounds. At first Lucerne is in a relationship with Zeb, one of the Group leaders (while the focus of this novel is on the female characters, Zeb is a charismatic figure and it is no surprise that he comes to the fore in final novel of the trilogy). When that relationship breaks down and Lucerne and Ren return to their compound, (Lucerne claiming to have been kidnapped, a not entirely unknown experience), Ren goes to a conventional compound school where she meets Jimmy (Snowman) and Glenn (Crake). This is the starting point for the timelines of the two novels to merge.

Atwood carefully creates a very convincing portrait of a world where science is unchecked and is taking us to the brink of catastrophe. Her warnings about gene editing technology, global warming, and climate change could not be clearer. This isn’t a ‘we are all doomed’ rant, but it tiptoes close to it: if a full-scale global apocalypse does ever happen I can imagine Atwood standing in the wings, tweeting ‘well I did tell you so’. Unlike with most other dystopias there is no real attempt to suggest a way out of this mess – we are probably past the point of no return, and all we can do (it is implies) is stock up on tinned goods and hide our guns.

There are a few other weaknesses in the narrative. The days of the apocalypse themselves remain strangely unexplored – we know in detail how it happened, and how the handful of survivors come together, but almost nothing about the event itself. Atwood is careful to provide elaborate reasons why Ren and Toby survive the pandemic (Ren is locked in a bio-secure environment when it happens – it’s not entirely clear why but it appears to be some sort of quarantine required as part of her role as a sex-worker; Toby locks herself in the high-end spa where she works, also ensuring her survival) but other survivors emerge without such clear reasons for their survival, and the novel’s plausibility wobbles alarmingly when they all end up being known to one another, including several of Jimmy’s previous girlfriends. This makes for moments of recognition when incidents in the first novel are called back, such as when Jimmy’s college girlfriend burnt his shoes because they were made of faux leather, but this doesn’t make them any more plausible.

As a dystopia The Year of the Flood doesn’t have a lot more to say than Oryx and Crake. But as an adventure story it is entertaining, even exciting at point, and the reader is always rooting for the God’s Gardeners, unlikely good guys in the apocalypse if ever there were any, to come out on top, The strange Crakers make a return appearance at the end of the novel when the action catches up with where we left it at the end of Oryx and Crake, setting things up for the exciting finale, MaddAddam.

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood, 2009