![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Ren tells her story in first person and present tense Toby is equally present, but in past tense and third person. But this book stands on its own and has a temper very different from the earlier work. Behind this book, interlocked and overlapping with it, lies Atwood's previous novel, There are survivors, two of them isolated women, Toby and Ren, through whom we come to experience the trajectory toward annihilation and renewal. The book dips into the years before the disaster, moving back and forth so that we often grasp consequences before we understand impulses. It is a year set in our near future (we are, perhaps, psychically nearer year 18 than year zero in the book's calendar, which sets the "waterless flood" in year 25). The year of the flood is the year that a near-universal plague has swept through humankind, but killed no other creatures. From the first page, we are in the grip of a storyteller who drives us on to fresh understanding and - amazingly - fresh enjoyment. For what distinguishes her imagined world is that it looks over the brink of our shared present and is marked by knowledge that we try to ignore. Margaret Atwood never quails in the face of the future she has conjured. ![]()
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