Fall from Edencliff

The Year of the Flood Margaret Atwood Bloomsbury Pages: 434 Rs 999

She is the prophet of apocalypses,the conjuror of intense dystopias. Margaret Atwood,who wrote of theocratic chauvinists taking over the US in The Handmaids Tale 1985,and telescoped the nightmares of a bioengineered universe in Oryx and Crake 2003,returns to familiar territory in her new novel The Year of the Flood. She is,in fact,revisiting an old territory the landscape of Oryx and Crake with its luminescent roses,green rabbits and perfect blue human beings walking out of laboratories.

The Year of the Flood traces the same trajectory as Oryx and Crake and has a few common characters,but the focus shifts from men and mad scientists to an eco cult called The Gods Gardeners and two women with quite unfeminine names,Toby and Ren. And,this time,the novel is loaded with sly satire; the Canadian Cassandra is grinning through the catastrophe.

The Gardeners and their leader Adam One oppose the bioengineered Eden that is governed by the Corporation and predict the coming of a plague the Waterless Flood that will wipe the world. They dread the Exfernal world just one instance of Atwoodian wordplay,the policing by the CorpSeCorps and the chain called SecretBurgers secret because no one knew what sort of animal protein was in them and you might find a snatch of cat fur or a fragment of mouse tail,or perhaps a human finger in it. These back-to-Earth extremists with a bad fashion sense who create their alternative heaven in Edencliff Rooftop Garden,take Vegivows,extract honey after talking to bees,sing often-ludicrous hymns and make sanctimonious speeches are more caricatures than heroes. Their plentiful saints include one Anil Agarwal wonder if that is a nod to the vegetarian billionaire who founded Vedanta Resources and Mahatma Gandhi.

Toby and Ren,the two narrators,are no eco warriors either. Theysurvive the so-called apocalypse because Toby happens to lock herself in AnooYoo Spa,and Ren is recovering from the attack of a customer in the brothel Scales and Tails. The novel begins in the post-Flood world,with both Toby and Ren looking back. And the landscape changes from a bleached wasteland where MoHairs mutant sheep with luxurious mane in dazzling purple,silver and blue graze,to the green but utterly bland universe of the Gardeners. The satire starts to work its way,but the narrative loses urgency and even vegetates occasionally.

Finally,it dawns on you that none of the characters dies of plague on stage,so to speak; there are references to how the pandemic started through a supersex pill called BlyssPluss; about men melting away in their solar cars and the elite being wiped out in their gated Compounds. On stage,there are only murders and suicides. As Atwood pokes fun at all sorts of extremists and their isms,The Year of the Flood gets spliced with such whimsy that it eventually laughs at its own and every doomsday prediction.