A revisit review of The Year of the Flood

Ok, I didn't quite get this in before the publication of MaddAddam, but not-too-long-after, here's a revisit of book two The Year of the Flood! The MaddAddam review will be coming soonish...

The Year of the Flood is a bit of an odd one, as it features people, places and ideas from Oryx and Crake and takes place concurrently with both of the two timelines in that novel (see the revisit review of Oryx and Crake here). Once again, main characters Ren and Toby are in the dystopian aftermath of a worldwide cataclysm remembering their childhood in the capitalist-greed dystopia that preceded it, just as Snowman was in the first book. The trouble with this is it takes a little while to shake off the feeling of deja vu and sink into the new novel. Reading them years apart (as you would have done had you originally bought and read them at the time of their release) would probably mitigate against this, but reading them one after the other almost feels like it's a bit boring to begin with because the similarities are what your mind sees first and while Oryx and Crake ended too soon, you want to read more about the world Margaret Atwood created, not learn the same things about it over again.

However, as the novel continues, you see that this is just another thread in the same story - it could have been woven in as alternate chapters in an incredibly long Oryx and Crake. In a way, the two stories are one, with six parts that could have been pieced together in any combination and still made up a single whole, a tale of the fall, not from grace, but down the last few steps of a broken world. The nuggets revealed about Snowman and Crake, the new angles on the same deeds and extra pieces of puzzle are tantalisingly unwrapped, explaining so much more about them while still not completely answering all of your questions. There's even a single image of Oryx seen through Ren's eyes that colours her a different shade and fills her in a little more than she was, given her almost mythological status in the first book.

The mystical, mythological and mysterious are somewhat removed from this novel by the clearheaded thinking of both Ren and Toby. Where the first book was framed by Snowman's uncertain grasp of reality, Ren and Toby give steady, if very different, views of their worlds, both the corporate-ridden tyrannies of their past and the harsh realities of their present. Despite this, they also have more hope than Snowman ever had, a feeling aided by the fully-fleshed supporting cast. Whether they're more hopeful because they have more people in their lives or they have more people in their lives because they're more hopeful is perhaps something Atwood would like us to think about, but whatever the reason, where Snowman was the lone and lonely mad survivor of an apocalypse, Ren and Toby hint at the possibility of rebirth, making this a very different kind of story to Oryx and Crake.

While the first book was a rollicking ride through a new world, this is a slower pace but deeper look into a world we already know. It's a bit like the first book was that bit where you get to a new level in an RPG game like Tomb Raider and you run around like a mad thing trying to see everything at once, while this one is the longer look you have once the map is straight in your head, where you start to pick up the prizes and find the secrets pathways. Ren and Toby's childhood experience is not just of the cloistered corporate Compounds where Snowman grew up, but of the pleeblands - the poor, the seedy and the underground elements of this world - which is an interesting new viewpoint, even if it does slide occasionally into some simplistic moralising.

The second book in a built world is always a toughie, the landscape and the rules that are so much fun to reveal have been established, so the story really needs to move on, bring in new characters and start new adventures. While we get great new characters from The Year of the Flood and new adventures, there isn't the quite the forward momentum you're hoping for. By the time the story gets going, there isn't the space to really make a lot of distance, leaving a vague sense of dissatisfaction. At this stage, we know that MaddAddam, the third book, is here (waiting on my virtual bookshelf as it happens), but without the hope that that story will reveal more, The Year of the Flood would be something of a disappointment. While Ren and Toby have interesting stories to tell, they lack some of the power of Snowman's personality, they're just not quite as intriguing and since the background is the same, it feels a little like a weaker version of the first book. However, with second books as with second movies, creators often have half an eye on the finale already, leaving book two with some heavy lifting to do in exposition and setup and less of a racing plot of its own, which is only really a very bad thing if book three doesn't live up to its promise.