2011.06.17 — The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood: Finished

Margaret Atwood.
The Year of the Flood.
UK: Virago Press (Little, Brown Book Group), 2010.
ISBN: 1844085643.

☆☆☆☆☆ out of ☆☆☆☆☆.

TYotF is an excellent companion to Oryx and Crake. Actually, it was so good that I finished the book before I had time to create my 'begun reading' blog.

At a high level, it was fun to see how, and how effectively, Atwood played with the characters crossing between the two books. At a more subtle level, how Atwood dexterously extended and deepened the shallowness of the pleeb world was extremely funny, very sad, and disturbingly reflective.

This world resonated with me more than that of O&C's, including the characters. In part because it is more close to the world that I see around me including the seeds of her descriptive dystopia. I found Atwood's slightly exagerated characterization of the lunatics and their groups to be on point and very real. The Gardener's Hymn book was a source of aeternal delight because it was both satirical and true at the same time.

Also the product names and uses, the social past times and entertainments, all delightfully echoed our marketed world. And at the same time Atwood somehow managed to pay a delightful homage to the world described by Orwell in 1984, while taking it along its own self-consistent path.

I think that the characters were more finely drawn in TYotF, and not just the females. Adam One and Zeb began flat, but this was perfectly described as if through the eyes of the resourceful, ever sceptical Toby. And as Toby grew the men became characters and not caricatures.

Atwood's characterizations are powerfully, simply done. For example, the vanity of Ren's mother is delightful described by a daughter with a wisdom that is beyond her years and not quite grounded, but is at the same time told as if by someone still innocent as they would be after having lived in the Gardener's hippy-like commune:

'What are you doing in the closet, darling?' said Lucerne [Ren's mother]. 'Come and have some lunch! You'll feell better soon!' She sounded chirpy: the crazier and more disturbed I acted, the better it was for her, because the less anyone would believe me if I told on her.

Her story was that I'd been traumatized by being stuck in among the warped, brainwashing cult folk. I had no way of proving her wrong. Anyway maybe I had been traumatized: I had nothing to compare myself with (252-3).

Atwood's use of voice in the book is interesting. The young girl who becomes a women in the story, Ren, is told in the first person present. Toby, who begins as a young women is told in third person past. I'm not sure why this worked, but it did. I've thought about it, and I think it worked because Atwood was emphasizing the voice of the innocent child with an unconscious wisdom as being alive in the immediate present. Whereas Toby felt dislocated and outside of her existence throughout the book. I've given a small example of Ren abve, and now for Toby's character. Atwood's description is masterful, and takes the entire book. I'll begin with Ren's childhood description:

... The Gardener kids had nicknames for all of the teachers. Pilar was the Fungus, Zeb was the Mad Adam, Stuart was the Screw because he built furniture. Mugi was the Muscle, Manushka was the Mucous, Rebecca was the Salt and Peppler, Burt was the Knob because he was bald. Toby was the Dry Witch. Witch because she was always mixing things up and pouring them into bottles and Dry because she was so thin and hard, and to tell her apart from Nuala, who was the Wet Witch because of her damp mouth and her wobbly bum, and because you could make her cry so easily.
...
We could never make the Dry Witch Toby cry. The boys said she was a hardass — she and Rebecca were the two hardest asses. Rebecca was jolly on the outside, but you did not push her buttons. As for Toby, she was leathery inside and out. 'Don't try it Shackleton,' she would say, even though her back was turned. Nuala was too kind to us, but Toby held us to account, and we trusted Toby more: you'd trust a rock more than a cake (74-5).

Now, here's Toby through her own, 3rd person eyes:

Gradually, Toby stopped thinking that she should leave the Gardeners. She didn't really believe in their creed, but she no longer disbelieved. One season blended into the next — rainy, stormy, hot and dry, cooler and dry, rainy and warm — and then one year into another. She wasn't quite a Gardener, yet she wasn't a pleeblander any more. She was neither the one nor the other (116).

And, finally:

How old will I be, thought Toby, before I can be that calm? She felt cut open (127).

Toby's ambivalence was perfeclty described, and made the Gordener's ostensible silliness both more real and more endearing. This was no small feat of writing!

I won't say that this book is better than O&C, but rather that reading both books elevates them above what they are if read singly. I am strongly tempted, now, to re-read O&C to seek out the extended subtle overlaps between the two.

2011.04.24 — Oryx and Crake finished

☆☆☆☆☆ out of ☆☆☆☆☆.

This was a very well written, structured and characterized book. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Margaret Atwood.
Oryx and Crake.
Random House Inc.
Pages: 416 | ISBN: 9780385721677

Despite a few comments to the contrary that I read on Goodreads, the science fiction presented in the book is linked strongly enough to examples of current real world science to be taken seriously, as is Atwood's ecological links to the effects of global warming. And this is where it is dark, because the bleakness of the future is 100% plausible.

It struck me that some of the criticism against it from the science fiction readers is that in Atwood fashion it is the characters that drive the story and not the science, even as their situation derives from the science. In a peculiar way the science is secondary to the story, which makes it an odd sci-fi book, but in doing this Atwood has perfectly mimicked how the nuts and bolts of our science is secondary to us in our daily lives: the iMac I'm writing on and its connection to the world, smartphones, TV, radio, the automobile, all exist in my life with greater or lesser importance. However their creation, production and distribution are at best of passing concern. And so it is with the protagonist who, again in typical Atwood fashion, is a fully fleshed and flawed human who feels — and largely is — overwhelmed by life in a way that makes him somewhat unlikeable even as we can sympathize with his attitudes.

At one point Jimmy, the protagonist, having proved himself a poor student of privilege, wound up going to Martha Graham, a 3rd rate Arts university. I was amused by her pointed anti-school barbs, and by my finding them similar in spirit to those she wrote in The Edible Woman:

Jimmy had few illusions. He knew what sort of thing would be open to him when he came out the other end of Problematics with his risible degree. Window- dressing was what he'd be doing, at best—decorating the cold, hard, numerical real world in flossy 2-D verbiage. Depending on how well he did in his Problematcs courses—Applied Logic, Applied Rhetoric, Medical Ethics and Terminology, Applied Semantics, Relativistics and Advanced Mischaracterization, Comparative Cultural Psychology and the rest—he'd have a choice between well-paid window-dressing for a big Corp or flimsy cut-rate stuff for a borderline one. The prospect of his future life stretched before him like a sentence; not a prison sentence, but a long-winded sentence with a lot of unnecessary subordinate clauses, as he was soon in the habit of quipping during Happy Hour pickup time at the local campus bars and pubs. He couldn't say he was looking forward to it, this rest-of-his-life.

Nevertheless, he dug himself in at Martha Graham as if into a trench, and hunkered down for the duration. He shared a dorm suite—one cramped room either side, silverfish-ridden bathroom in the middle—with a fundamentalist vegan called Bernice, who had stringy hair held back with a wooden clip in the shape of a toucan and wore a succession of God's Gardeners T-shirts, which—due to her aversion to chemical compounds such as underarm deodorants — stank even when freshly laundered (229-30).

Amusingly, even as I enjoyed her satire of the trend of arts departments striving to be seen as corporately viable and important in our corporatist world, it was here that Atwood allowed herself to step oh-so slightly outside of character.

Morris Berman

The class 'Relativistics and Advanced Mischaracterization' will never exist on an arts' course calendar. Not that such courses don't exist! But instead they would be called something benign like 'Relativistics and Perceptions of Truth'. Lest you think I jest, Morris Berman cites an article about Stanford Business School ethics:

... In an article in the San Francisco Chronicle of 20 October 1985, David Lampert, himself a graduate of Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, described the "hidden curriculum" of the school as "the subconscious destruction of democratic values." The school's "ethics" course, B295, is (or was then^*) a training in how to outflank any external forces attempting to limit managerial autonomy — things such as constitutional entitlements, property, civil rights, and so on.

The course teaches the future business elite "how to stonewall the media, how to present oneself on television and protect corporate interests, [and] how to manipulate the public and Congress ...." Student papers on issues such as the Love Canal come back with comments such as, "Why didn't you advise Hooker Chemicals to sue the journalists who exposed the story?" while an exam question in another course states, "Assume that the memorandum you are writing will be burned before it reaches the Anti-Trust Division of the Department of Justice" (68).

*Note: a quick search on Stanford's web page did not find B295. But a search for 'ethics' found 2135 hits, including such things as Empathy and Ethics - Drivers of Our Shifting Culture.

This is an excellent read.

2011.04.19 — Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood Begun 2011.04.16

TR at work gave this a very strong recommendation late last year. And so I finally picked it up. It would appear that I am enjoying this a great deal. Already on page 71, and it has caught my attention.

Margaret Atwood.
Oryx and Crake.
Random House Inc.
Pages: 416 | ISBN: 9780385721677

Quick summary: as a consequence of ecological failure (mostly likely man-made) and somehow linked to science's fascination with making altered bio-life forms, the world comes to an end for man. Except for one, and some of the altered life forms. This is told with Atwood's usual excellence, and with her playing with tense in a story told in the first person present in that 'future' and 3rd person past, in the past. So far, this 'trick' or gimmick has been transparent to me, and wouldn't have though about it if I hadn't read someone's very poorly written review.

And now that I am getting well into it, I see that the quality of the criticism against it (at least in the book/writer oriented on-line writers soical network GoodReads), is of a very poor quality indeed. I'm still reserving my final opinion.