VIEWPOINT
Here comes the flood
Margaret Atwood is our finest chronicler of Armageddon
Last Updated: Sunday, September 27, 2009 | 9:22 PM ET
By Heather Mallick, CBC News
Canadian author Margaret Atwood. (Mike Clarke/AFP/Getty Images) The great thing about going to a Margaret Atwood reading of her new novel about the end of the world — in a Toronto Anglican cathedral, with a choir singing hymns, with actors and Atwood herself reciting from on high — is that you end up thinking the end of the world won't be so bad.
And after all, admit it, humanity was asking for it.
You listen to her description in The Year of the Flood of the stink of the last year on Earth: "The air smells faintly of burning, a smell of caramel and tar and rancid barbecues, and the ashy but greasy smell of a garbage-dump fire after it's been raining."
Sounds like now.
This latest Atwood dystopia paints the world in all its past glory and ultimate… pettiness.
The flood she describes is a waterless one, in which every human — barring a handful — contracts a virus that leads to a quick, frothing, puddle-of-blood, melty death. A subject of some grandeur, but am I concerned? There I sit, your basic human at a literary thing, riding my own idiotic train of thought: Ya know, I bet you could fit more than five audience members into a goddamn pew if people weren't so huge nowadays. And selfish. Scrunch over, why doncha? That actress has a voice that sounds like the hissing from iPods on the subway. Isn't Atwood's hair great, how can I steal her look, etc. etc.
Yes, this latest Atwood dystopia paints the world in all its past glory and ultimate… pettiness.
That's the genius of the woman who will win the Nobel Prize for Literature this fall if there's any justice, which there isn't. She nails us humans, and she will be so exact in her nailing, in her evocation of what it is like to be alive on this spinning blue and green ball of a world in this marvelous, shameful moment in all its stupid dreams, self-deception and brutality and efforts at goodness. She gets the soundtrack and palette right; she gets the tone perfectly. Her writing is intellectually and artistically stunning.
What other writer has the courage to describe Armageddon and make it funny? Her achievement and ambition raise the hackles of people who like their novels harmless, but Atwood's standing continues to rise worldwide.
The Year of the Flood reeks. It feels dire. It prickles with dangers. It will end in tears.
In "Year 25," the sun is so lethal that humans only venture out in "top to toes," and the landscape is washed out and littered with a variety of horrible deaths — viruses, government spray-gunning, organ snatching and "pleeb" swarmings. The only splashes of colour are the luminous animals and plants that were genetically engineered to everyone's bitter regret. Pink is very big.
(Random House Canada) "Strange how that colour still seems tender," Atwood wrote in Oryx and Crake, the companion novel from 2003. Over the course of this new novel, any number of pretty chirpy things have grown sinister.
When humans wear their thick, sexy hair grown by "Mo'Hair" pastel sheep, its muttony smell attracts ravenous and eerily intelligent "pigoons" — huge pigs that trot around looking for meat. Smart humans always suspected they themselves were just meat raised above their station, but now it's literal.
"Oops," as Atwood said in a recent PBS interview. "There are a lot of 'oops' in the world of biological engineering." As in life, and as in this novel. Humans know they have massively erred but are still sparkily trying to fix things for themselves individually or for their class. As for the pleebs, forget them. (Um, anyone reading this will be a pleeb, by the way.)
At the moment, Atwood is on a major book tour, backed by a terrific choral group singing the hymns of God's Gardeners, the hippie survival cult that is the centre of Atwood's perfectly mapped plot. They sing songs of repentance — not that it will do any good. I assume Atwood's intention is to wake readers up to the reckoning that humanity is facing, and if you need theatre to do that, good for her.
But there's a resigned air to The Year of the Flood, partly because so many of the predictions of so many writers — Atwood included — over the decades have come true. And yet, what good did their warnings do?
Doris Lessing captured a human race almost obliterated by drought in Mara and Dann (1999); Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949; anti-abortionists and anti-sexers are marching about North America this fall like something out of The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood's novel from 1985. If you want to know what the unstoppable kudzu vine will do to Canada as it moves north, read Alan Weisman's recent book, The World Without Us, for a non-fiction description of a humanless, vine-ridden world where high rises are home only to vegetation. The line between donating and selling organs was breached long ago, and gene-splicing is no longer fictional.
As for surviving the Flood, Atwood needs her protagonists, but in real life, would you want to be a survivor? "I'd just lie there and cry," as the comedian David Cross writes in his new book, I Drink for a Reason, and I'm with him on this one.
There are no lessons in Atwood, ever, and that's why people are wrong to think her writing has political content. She is Pandora, opening up the box of what is possible, and today's average, frightened person is uncomfortable with her work. Her only message is that human beings screw up. If the human race continues in some form, as is suggested by the parallel endings of both Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, they — sorry, we — will screw things up all over again.
It's a cycle of beauty and horror. Don't blame Atwood — blame us.
This Week: Renowned curator Mark Haworth-Booth spoke at the Art Gallery of Ontario about the art and reportage of photography. He's terrific, as you'll see in the best documentary on photography ever made, the BBC's The Genius of Photography, which I urge you to watch. On Sept. 30, the fall-on-your-knees great Ghanaian artist El Anatsui will speak. On Oct. 2, he will be in Calgary at the Glenbow Museum. I do hope huge crowds of Calgarians will show up to hear how he first devised his sagging, flowing curtains of "recycled" tokens of wealth.
