Monday, January 4, 2010

THE YEAR OF THE FLOOD - A Review


Margaret Atwood is the perfect example of the concept that quality is determined by general consensus. That is, something is good when enough people agree it is good, even if it truly is crap. Other examples would be the music of Madonna, the fiction of James Patterson, TV's Survivor and every Quentin Tarrentino movie.

Not only is Margaret Atwood a hack, she's a boring hack. And, worse than that, she is a deluded hack. The Year Of The Flood is a companion novel to 2003's Oryx and Crake, which portrayed the world being destroyed by catastrophic climate change and genetic engineering.

TYOTF centers on the lives of Ren and Toby, female members of a fundamentalist sect of Christian environmentalists, the God's Gardeners. Led by the charismatic Adam One, whose sermons and eco-hymns punctuate the narrative, the God's Gardeners are preparing for life after the prophesied Waterless Flood. The believers are ingrained with Adam One's pacificist and environmentalist's teachings - enviro-theology. They are vegetarian - unless you get really, really hungry, and then you start eating from the bottom of the food chain up.

Just to show you how nutty the entire thing is, Atwood had created new saints for God's Gardners to emulate - Al Gore and Rachel Carson.

Al Gore has been proved to be nothing more than a modern-day flim-flam man making millions of dollars off sketchy and unproven theories of global warming. He is either one of the most evil men in the world, or one of the most deluded.

Rachel Carson is nothing less than the greatest mass murderer of the last century. Her book Silent Spring so effectively advocated the banning of DDT against mosquitoes that politicians blindly rushed to pass a ban. Fifty years (and 30 million deaths from malaria) later, Carson's theory that DDT is harmful to the environment, humans and other creatures has been so thoroughly discredited than anyone who uses her name to defend environmental causes must be delusional, like dropping Hitler's name to discuss your support of Jewish culture.

But politics aside, Atwood has violated the first law of writing fiction: IT'S BORING! Nothing happens. And what does happen is so silly and flimsy that only someone as deluded as Al Gore could take it seriously.

BIBLIO SAYS: Ignore!

Companion Read: The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner. A true dystopic masterpiece.



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