- eitel5
The Year of the Flood: Religion in Apocalypse
Though not a novel about a literal flood, The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood is a stunning work of apocalyptic fiction. The second book in a series of three, it focuses on the lives of Toby and Ren, their stories leading up to the "waterless flood," and how they ended up in a religious group called the God's Gardeners when the pandemic took hold.
This religion was what captured mine and other readers' attention throughout the whole book, and it sparked my curiosity about how religion manifests itself when there is nothing else to live for. David Quammen mentions in his nonfiction book about animal pandemic, Spillover, that people tend to hold on to what they know and love when struck with something plaguing or world-ending. This is what I saw in The Year of the Flood. Toby, who gained the title of Eve Six in the Gardeners about halfway through the novel, carried her religion to the very end. Even in a scarcity of food, and with the threat of Painballers from prison at her heels, she hesitated to pull the trigger on her rifle: the only thing she had left to defend herself at world's end.
This contradicted my previous thinking of life during a pandemic (even though we are obviously living the dream right now). If the world were to end, and myself and only a few others were the only ones left on the planet, I might have to rearrange my morals and adjust my priorities. Just a little.
Between Spillover and Year of the Flood, the biggest difference to note is that Atwood's story was not one of zoonosis. Quammen goes into some detail in his third chapter about how even malaria couldn't be called a zoonosis, and pandemics of zoonosis are usually more dangerous as they, well, spill over. Atwood recognized in her novel on multiple occasions that the genetically modified creatures could not catch the plague, though there wasn't much information for the characters Ren and Toby to know that. That made me wonder; if "animals" couldn't catch this plague, then it's not a zoonotic disease, right? What if the genetically modified creatures - rakunks, the blue people, the pigs with human brain tissue - could catch the plague? How much of a difference is there really, between these "creatures" and the humans that made them? Another storm could be brewing...