Saturday, March 26, 2011

CBR III #3 - The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

I've been slacking off on the writing of reviews, but not on reading the books, so hopefully I'll be able to catch up shortly.  The third book I read this year was The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood.  I was fully expecting to at least like this book, since I loved both The Handmaid's Tale and The Blind Assassin.  Unfortunately, I found The Year of the Flood a struggle to read through to the end.  I wanted to skip every single one of the God's Gardeners' hymns and preachy manifestos that preceded all the changes in narrator.  They were as annoyingly sanctimonious and hippy dippy as you would expect from something called a God's Gardeners' hymn and sermon.  Also, I've never liked poetry/lyrics intermixed with a novel.  Just give me straight up prose please.  Fittingly, the GG hymns and sermons set the tone of the entire novel.  I'm all for the idea of living naturally off the earth and avoiding waste and the creation of waste, but the preachy earthier-than-thou tone of the book set my teeth on edge.

The story starts off with the event in question, the flood, having already happened.  The reader is introduced to the first narrator Toby, who is surviving on her own in one of the abandoned God's Gardeners' compounds.  Eventually, interspersed with the other narrator's stories, each character's background and affiliation with the God's Gardeners is revealed.  Sadly enough though, even a quarter of the way into the book, I couldn't have cared less.  While I usually enjoy Atwood's slow pacing and measured reveal of her characters and their motivations, the overly earthy moralizing tone of this book ruined it for me.

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