Review by Rachel Krueger

Margaret Atwood is at her haranguing best when she’s whipping up appalling futures for us all. She’s had several career missteps when her agenda has written cheques that her skills can’t cash, but The Year of the Flood recovers her dormant core of brilliance that we all know and love (and secretly fear).

As usual with La Atwood (and apocalyptic lit in general, I suppose) you’ll begin this book confused re: why everyone is dead. The Waterless Flood (see: title) has just swept through the earth and killed everyone except those who were accidentally secreted away somewhere. How Toby, the wiry old Gardeneress, and Ren, a nimble young sex-worker, missed out on the plague and how mankind ended up in a wretched soup of its own making make up most of the novel.

And this is no new soup. The freakiest thing about Dystopia-Wood may be that she isn’t all NEW MONSTERS! but rather THINGS CURRENTLY EXISTING MADE BELIEVABLY TERRIFYING! – like gene splicing and vitamin supplements – which makes TYotF both plausible and freaky shit. And if the foreboding doesn’t get you, then Toby’s lonely past, doled out in pieces, will stab you good.

If the beginning is vaguely Atwoodian, the “conclusion” reeks of her. Be forewarned, Flood doesn’t so much end as run out of pages. There will not be enough answers to satisfy you, and even though you had to plow through some 430+ pages to get here, you wouldn’t say no to an epilogue or two – which will not be forthcoming – and you will be not much less confused than when you started. This is both Atwood’s blessing and her curse, that you are so entrenched in her characters and her world that being cut off this way makes you feel bereft. But you will be used to that, because you will have read Oryx and Crake.

Or, you know, not, because it’s certainly not a prerequisite to reading Flood. While O&C reveals more of the apocalypse’s whodunit and howdidit, TYotF deals with those harbingers who saw it coming, and tried to stop it. With GARDENING and RECYCLING (I know, eye-roll, right? But you will find yourself oddly sympathetic to their efforts). It is neither a prequel nor a sequel, but more of a meanwhile-back-at-the-ranch-quel. A concurrentquel? A stand-alone, at any rate.

And somewhere along the road Miss Marg seems to have become gentler with her agenda-mongering. There’s a good bit of Environmentalistic hoodoo here, but she wears this cloak more easily than her Women’s Movement Power-Suit or her Anti-theists Robe, and it feels less like being clubbed over the head with a handful of tracts. Besides, she’s been auctioning off character names to benefit things like Clean Air and Victims of Torture, which you have to admit is rad. You couldn’t really look down your nose at her if you wanted to.

So even though reading Atwood has become like literary Russian Roulette, The Year of the Flood is one book where you won’t end up shot. Or will . . . depending on how you interpret that metaphor. Flood is great, is what I’m saying.

In my previous post to this section I said I’d be back in seven days with my thoughts on Yann Martel’s bibliophilic jihad against Stephen Harper. That was, er, um, six weeks ago. But hey, who hasn’t been following the Paris Hilton news coverage 24/7?

In any event, in the interim a correspondent has asked, “What is so ‘insufferably pompous’ about presenting Orwell’s 1984 to our disgusting, neo-fascist wannabe dictator?”

Thankyou for asking, “Avid Aphid.”

Maybe it has something to do with the circumstances that launched Martel’s campaign to send Harper a book every two weeks. He and 49 other artists attended a session of Parliament in order to mark the 50th anniversary of the Canada Council — an important anniversary, worth noting. Martel, however, was piqued that when the 50 of them were introduced, there was but a “flutter of applause,” and the Prime Minister, Martel thinks, didn’t even look up. This prompted his outburst in The Globe and Mail shortly after. “Do we count for nothing, you philistines, I felt like shouting down at the House. Don’t you know that Canadians love their books and songs and paintings? Do you really think we’re just parasites feeding off the honest, hard work of our fellow citizens?”

Now, this sort of thing is embarrassing, as embarrassing as when Margaret Atwood went off on the Conservatives as “people who have never seen any arts in their own lives,” the more so because Martel crossed party lines to slag the whole House. It puts me in mind of Constantine Treplieff, the misunderstood genius in Chekhov’s The Seagull, railing against the rubes who aren’t sufficiently appreciative of him or his art, with the difference that Martel, while he may be a genius (I have no idea; I haven’t read his fiction; no, not even Life of Pi), is hardly misunderstood. He’s been rewarded rather nicely for his work, and hasn’t a lot of reason to be shouting about his fate in Parliament, even internally. Nor have those other 49 artists, who were there precisely because, at some point in their careers, via the Canada Council, the government of their country gave them financial support. Stephen Harper didn’t give them the further recognition they think they deserve? Suck it up. Maybe they shouldn’t have been in Ottawa seeking the approbation of politicians anyway; maybe they should have been at home, making art.

This attitude of wounded hauteur gets us nowhere as artists trying to convince the unconverted of the worth of what we do (a constituency that is in any event, and as Martel implies, ever-shrinking). Unfortunately, Martel has decided to extend his passive-aggressive hissy-fit indefinitely, or at least for as long as Harper is Prime Minister, with his “What is Stephen Harper Reading?” project, which sees him sending His Right Honour a book every two weeks, with a letter explaining all the reasons Harper should dig right into it. So far, Martel’s selections have tended to the high-brow; his first was Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, and the most recent, as of this writing, was The Bhagavad Gita.

Misnomers aside (The Bhagavad Gita is almost certainly what Stephen Harper isn’t reading this week), Martel’s project carries the clear implication that Harper is an idiot. This is carried through into the letters, which begin with lines like “Now that your Flames have been knocked out of the playoffs . . .” (translation: Hey, you big hockey-loving oaf; listen up), or go on about how many books Wilfrid Laurier and William Lyon Mackenzie King owned. Now, say what you want about Stephen Harper — call him a “disgusting, neo-fascist wannabe dictator,” even — but one thing he isn’t is stupid. And while Martel will no doubt eventually get a nifty little collection of literary criticism out of the project, he won’t have made even a cinch-mark on Stephen Harper’s brain. Because, as any good teacher will tell you, the best way to ensure the failure of a lesson is to begin by letting the student know how impeccably learned you are, and, by extension, how stupid he is.

And that, Ms. or Mr. Aphid, is what makes Martel’s bi-weekly two-man book club so “insufferably pompous.” But as I said, thanks for asking. And I hope we’ll hear from you at least every two weeks.

Some of my fellow writer-types are being particularly irritating these days, and not in a good way. It is, of course, part of an artist’s job to be irritating some of the time, as, for example, the Dixie Chicks were about George Bush’s war. By the time Americans got through being irritated with them, they’d realized the girls were right. Mission Accomplished. The trick, though, is to pick your battles carefully, and to not look like total arseholes while you prosecute them.

Which brings us to Margaret Atwood and Yann Martel, who have been in high dudgeon lately over what they say is the Harper government’s indifference to the arts. Atwood began back in February with an essay in her favourite samizdat organ, The Globe and Mail. “It seems to be the intention of the Harper neocons to bleed and starve Canada’s cultural institutions until they croak,” she intoned (one can hear her saying it in that monotonous voice she uses for poetry readings), following up with this clincher: “Proposed Liberal top-up to the Canada Council before the last election: $300-million. Conservatives have delivered: $50-million.”

Then last week she advised the CBC that the Tories “basically just hate us” (artists, that is). “You know it’s people who have never seen any arts in their own lives — they would rather not have gardens, they would rather have parking lots. They just think it’s a frill probably.”

Right. All those flower-hating, parking-lot loving conservatives. Why don’t they just go back to Alberta where they can, er, step on flowers and kiss parking lots?

Now, I have no unrequited love for the Conservative Party; I’m the guy who, back when they were still the Reform Party, advised my Toronto buddies that rather than making fun of Preston Manning’s hair and glasses they might want to check out the Reformers’ cultural policies, on the off-chance the troglodytes came to power some day. Actually, this was bad advice, as Preston and friends had no cultural policies, and my Toronto friends might have grown old looking for them.

But at least they wouldn’t be sitting ducks if the day came that Myron Thompson was named Minister of Canadian Heritage. (I don’t know if Myron Thompson hates flowers, but he’s the kind of Conservative that Atwood probably had in mind when she applied her broad brush to the party.)

Lo these ten-or-so years later, Myron Thompson isn’t the Minister of Canadian Heritage; Bev Oda is. And just as Stephen Harper hasn’t eaten babies and decorated 24 Sussex Drive in crushed velvet, as his opponents assured us he would, neither have the Conservatives gutted the arts. Not even Margaret Atwood has the fictional powers to turn the act of giving the Canada Council an additional $50 million into some sort of ritual disembowelling. And to compare it to whatever figure the Liberals dreamed up in the midst of an election campaign that saw them growing more desperate by the day, and promising money to everyone and everything in sight, is either silly or tendentious. This, after all, is the party that also once promised to get rid of the GST and rip up the Free Trade Agreement.

But then, Stephen Harper is Margaret Atwood’s worst nightmare, and then some: not only a Conservative, but a Conservative from out west. Dame Peggy seems to have had a hate-on for western Canada, and Alberta in particular, since sometime in the late ’60s, when she had to spend two years in Edmonton as an English instructor at the U of A. Edmonton was cold in winter, so she didn’t like it (though she did get a particularly acerbic short story out of the experience). The same cannot be said, however, of Yann Martel, who is currently back in Saskatoon and working as writer-in-residence at the University of Saskatchewan, having previously spent a year as writer-in-residence at that city’s public library. Martel, apparently, likes a good slap of prairie populism from time to time. What, then, to make of his insufferably pompous plan to send the Prime Minister a new book every two weeks?

We’ll have to think about that one. Check back here in about seven days.

Part II: Yann Martel’s two-man book club