The Year of the Flood

By: Margaret Atwood

Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne, Katie MacNichol, Mark Bramhall

Length: 14 hrs and 4 mins

Publisher's summary

The long-awaited new novel from Margaret Atwood. The Year of the Flood is a dystopic masterpiece and a testament to her visionary power. The times and species have been changing at a rapid rate, and the social compact is wearing as thin as environmental stability. Adam One, the kindly leader of the God's Gardeners - a religion devoted to the melding of science and religion, as well as the preservation of all plant and animal life - has long predicted a natural disaster that will alter Earth as we know it. Now it has occurred, obliterating most human life. Two women have survived: Ren, a young trapeze dancer locked inside the high-end sex club Scales and Tails, and Toby, a God's Gardener barricaded inside a luxurious spa where many of the treatments are edible.

Have others survived? Ren's bioartist friend Amanda? Zeb, her eco-fighter stepfather? Her onetime lover, Jimmy? Or the murderous Painballers, survivors of the mutual-elimination Painball prison? Not to mention the shadowy, corrupt policing force of the ruling powers...

Meanwhile, gene-spliced life forms are proliferating: The lion/lamb blends, the Mo'hair sheep with human hair, the pigs with human brain tissue. As Adam One and his intrepid hemp-clad band make their way through this strange new world, Ren and Toby will have to decide on their next move. They can't stay locked away...

By turns dark, tender, violent, thoughtful, and uneasily hilarious, The Year of the Flood is Atwood at her most brilliant and inventive.

©2009 Margaret Atwood (P)2009 Random House

Slow to start Please don’t end

I almost gave up on this book as I tried to start other ones and this one was left to simmer. After the slow set up in the usual Atwood style I didn’t want it to end. It took almost the first 1/3 to want to know more. I savored the last chapters and still needed to know more. I’m happy to see a book to follow.
The hymns are bizarre and I flew past most but I’m sure I’ll regret not listening as the singer MaddAdam is the next story! I think!

meh

Way too much back story and so slow for basically 10 of the 14 hours. The last 4 hours of the book were interesting and exciting but up until then it's basically back story. The narration was fine. I'm not sure that I will complete the trilogy though.

Disappointed Atwood Fan

Atwood's dystopian post apocalyptic efforts like The Handmaid's Tale and Onyx and Crake are quite wonderful and memorable. This one falls short of those masterpieces.
The rather somber feel remains but this story seems aimless and ill conceived or formed.
I won't quit on Atwood yet but I can't really encourage anyone to start with this one as a good intro to her work.

Great Atwood, great audio (even the music)

I am a huge Atwood fan, and have listened to Oryx and Crake at least twice. The reader is good, though I really liked the male reader in O&C a bit more. I enjoyed the connections between the two books, and the different perspective it lends. The music was a bit strange at first, but it does a great job of adding to the "goofiness" of the God's Gardeners (think hippie folksy 70s Christian music), along with Adam One's "sermons". The story tells well, and it has that same Atwood tongue-in-cheek cynical world view. If you liked Oryx and Crake, you'll like this one too. Not a world I'd care to live in, but very thought provoking and engaging.

Read Oryx and Crake one last time before this

The Year of the Flood is Margaret Atwood at the height of her powers. Very few authors have the courage to attempt the whole "create a religion" thing, and practically none of them can actually pull it off. Yet Atwood has here a whole book detailing a minor religious sect that isn't ridiculous on the face of it, even writing hymns that (while admittedly tedious to listen to) actually sound like hymns. This all but blows the mind.

Unfortunately, Atwood has set this whole thing in the same universe as her absolute classic, Oryx and Crake. Why? What was the point? It's like watching the greatest conjurer of all time, only to have the climax of her act be a rabbit pulled out of top hat. This book all but ruins its predecessor, filling in gaps, dispelling mysteries, and answering questions that nobody on earth wanted filled, dispelled, or answered.

OK, you know Pulp Fiction, the Quentin Tarantino film? Remember that one scene where Vincent and Jules are shaking down those kids in the apartment, and Vincent opens a mysterious attache case and stares in wonder at whatever is inside? And later, Tim Roth's character does the same thing? And you're like "what's in the case?!" Then what happened? YOU GREW UP. Now, what if Tarantino made a sequel to Pulp Fiction starring, like, Steve Buscemi's Buddy Holly waiter, where he FINDS OUT WHAT'S IN THE CASE and it's like the most obvious thing imaginable. Only fat useless nerds who don't get it at all would be super happy to see this film.

That's what this book is. It's what's in the case. Oryx and Crake was flawlessly built up to an ambiguous ending, where Jimmy's intentions are unclear and subject to a massive amount of debate. Guess what? NOT ANYMORE. Now we know what happens, and it's a load of old bunk. A lame attempt is made to replace it with another kind of cliffhanger, but it's the kind of cliffhanger where a bomb is ticking down and the screen cuts off at 00:01. WILL THE BOMB EXPLODE?

Who cares?

An excellent companion piece

I'm surprised that some reviewers didn't like the connection with Oryx and Crate and/or the music. I thought the flip of perspective fascinating and not at all heavy-handed. The music added a level of immediacy and realism to the religious world of the Gardeners that works. I found this a very satisfying companion piece to Oryx and Crate.

Wonderful! (except for the music)

Fantastic tale that adds to the Oryx & Crake mythos. The only thing I would change is that horrid music. The preaching was okay, but that music was killing me.

Worth reading

This story is written along approximately the same timeline as Oryx and Crake but from the plebes point of view. It does resolve some questions from Oryx and Crake and it's fun to revisit those characters. The characters from Oryx and Crake and from this book lives are intertwined which is a bit unrealistic when you consider how large the population is. But oh well. But alas it is like the others, a good story with no resolution although I wouldn't let that stop you from reading it.

Great story, one bad narrator

Would you listen to The Year of the Flood again? Why?

No, I rarely re-listen to (or re-read) books.

Did the narration match the pace of the story?

Bernadette Dunne (narrator for the character Toby) had a terrible habit of ending her sentences with an upward inflection, making every statement into a half-question. This stopped about 2/3rds of the way in, or perhaps I finally became desensitized to it.

Any additional comments?

My only real complaint was with Bernadette Dunne's narration. I will be avoiding anything narrated by her in the future.

An Excellent Story and Performance

The only quibble I have with this production is the jolting and out-of-place nature of the Gardener hymns. I thought (or hoped) that the electronically enhanced and heavily produced music would be explained later in some kind of meta-commentary, but no. It doesn't sound like low-tech Gardeners to me. So, only four stars for performance, even though the voice actors were excellent.