![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The tone here couldn’t be more different from that of “Oryx and Crake,” the 2003 Man Booker finalist that this book rewrites and retells. She may be imagining a world in flames, but she’s doing it with a dark cackle. Stuffed with cornball hymns, genetic mutations worthy of Thomas Pynchon (such as the rakuunk, a combined skunk and raccoon) and a pharmaceutical company run amok, it reads like dystopia verging on satire. So it’s a welcome surprise that her new novel, “The Year of the Flood,” is a slap-happy romp through the end times. From 1972’s “Surfacing,” a virtuoso rewriting of the Demeter myth, to “The Handmaid’s Tale,” with its baroquely imagined future in which women are slaves, Atwood’s best books are dream capsules in which greed, destructive anti-environmentalism, religious fundamentalism and the constant desire to subject the will of women combine into a proto-fascist force.īecause Atwood thinks deeply on these matters, her vision is often bleak. But no novels, and it is in her novels that Margaret Atwood spins the most arresting alternate mythologies to our hell-bent world. Yes, there have been half a dozen books, an opera even. Lady Oracle has been quiet the last six years. ![]()
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