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holly_moward 's review for:
The Year of the Flood
by Margaret Atwood
It’s been close to three years since I read Oryx and Crake—not because I didn’t have the sequels on hand or because I didn’t feel inspired to continue the saga, but instead because I found Margaret Atwood’s vision of a bombed-out, pandemic-ridden future so unsettling and believable that I needed that long to mentally recover before carrying on. I love Oryx and Crake; it’s not often that I finish a book and sit back feeling totally awed. The thing I recall the most about it is how deftly Atwood weaves together the narrative, how masterfully she builds the plot until its gut-punch ending. The Year of the Flood was not as solid, in my opinion. I can’t tell if it’s because the point of view switches between two characters or if she just wasn’t as inspired, but the sequel felt more stiff, more rushed than the perfect, deliberate pacing of Oryx and Crake. My main complaint is that it felt like she was trying to force all these interwoven threads between the two when it might’ve been more interesting for the stories to be more disconnected. It just seemed so unlikely that there would be so much crossover between these casts of characters, and I can suspend my disbelief just as well as the next guy but it felt more forced than anything. I also felt confused by the passage of time at different points, though I could tell that if I’d read Oryx and Crake more recently that probably wouldn’t have been as big of an issue.
All that being said, Atwood never loses her shine for worldbuilding and storytelling. Part of what’s so unsettling about these books is that I can easily see them foreshadowing a possible near future, and that future is bleak as hell. She wrote Oryx and Crake in 2003, a novel about the apocalypse caused by a global pandemic, which certainly made for uneasy reading in the 2020s, but the other prescient aspects of the series are what weigh on my mind—things about climate change, capitalism, the fabric of society crumbling slowly but surely. Things that I can easily imagine becoming true and things I do not particularly want to be alive to witness. I want to read the third and final book in the trilogy, but I think I might need to take another couple of years to build up to it.
All that being said, Atwood never loses her shine for worldbuilding and storytelling. Part of what’s so unsettling about these books is that I can easily see them foreshadowing a possible near future, and that future is bleak as hell. She wrote Oryx and Crake in 2003, a novel about the apocalypse caused by a global pandemic, which certainly made for uneasy reading in the 2020s, but the other prescient aspects of the series are what weigh on my mind—things about climate change, capitalism, the fabric of society crumbling slowly but surely. Things that I can easily imagine becoming true and things I do not particularly want to be alive to witness. I want to read the third and final book in the trilogy, but I think I might need to take another couple of years to build up to it.