She is the prophet of apocalypses, the conjuror of intense dystopias. Margaret Atwood, who wrote of theocratic chauvinists taking over the US in The Handmaid’s 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 God’s 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.

... contd.