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Year of the Flood is told from the perspectives of Ren and Toby, who
recount the story of their lives and how they survived Crake’s
apocalyptic pandemic, which they call the “waterless flood
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Toby has found shelter in an AnooYoo day spa
...
However, her survival depends on her ability to continue
feeding herself
...
Toby must also
concentrate to minimize the effects of cabin fever, especially after
she sees the hybrid Crakers from Oryx and Crake
...

Meanwhile, Ren is trapped in the Sticky Zone, a sealed-off control
room at the upscale strip club Skins and Tails
...
Although she is passing the time exercising and listening to
natural sounds outside, she will not be able to escape until someone
arrives to enter the password on the door
...
However, she hopes that her childhood friend
Amanda Payne has survived
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Her father was unable to pay for her
mother’s medication and hospital care, and he kills himself after his
wife’s death while Toby is at home
...
Unfortunately, there are few places
to work without proper identification
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At Secret Burger, Toby is sexually
abused by her boss, Blanco, and it is only when a group of God’s
Gardeners come to the restaurant that she is able to escape from
him
...
Although she is at first put off by their
creed, she makes a home for herself
...
In fact, their
leader, Adam One, was once a scientist who studied epidemics
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Over time, Toby discovers that the
Gardeners have a great deal of knowledge about how to survive
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Ren’s mother begins
dating Zeb, one of the Adams on the Gardener’s council of Adams
and Eves
...
” Although Toby does not subscribe to every
aspect of the Gardener’s creed, she comes to understand its benefits
in a way Ren does not
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Ren befriends one of these children, Amanda, and ends up taking
her back to the Gardeners
...
During her exile she has
learned how to defend herself
...
” Amanda and Ren begin
to gossip and pick on another girl, Bernice
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Adam Thirteen is arrested for selling drugs
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Ren and her mother, Lucerne, leave after the latter
has a fight with her lover
...
” There, Ren meets
Jimmy (the protagonist of Oryx and Crake) and falls in love with him,
but their relationship ends badly
...
However, Lucerne informs her that she will
not be able to continue at university after a rival company abducts
her father
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Blanco, who raped Toby at Secret Burgers and still intends to exact
his revenge for her escape, has survived several sessions of
Painball, a blood sport that has taken the place of prison sentences
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Blanco and his friends attack the Gardeners, who
successfully defend themselves
...
It turns
out that the Gardeners have secret connections in many
corporations
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However, Ren finds that
she cannot stand working in the spa, particularly after her mother
Lucerne shows up for treatment
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However, Toby continues at her spa, and she builds an Ararat in
preparation for the waterless flood
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Zeb has formed a new group called
“MaddAddam
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There’s at least a hundred new extinct
species since this time last month
...
In
contrast, Adam One’s view is that
our role in respect to the Creatures is to bear witness
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You can’t fight blood
with blood
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One of them is Crake, who applauds MaddAdam’s actions,
particularly the way they have created and released microbes that
eat asphalt
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At one point, Toby reflects that it
wasnot an ordinary pandemic: it wouldn’t be contained after a few
hundred thousand deaths
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Ren is
rewarded for her patience when Amanda arrives after having
survived the plague—and the initial survivors of it
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The group tries to join Toby, but they are attacked just outside
the spa
...

Toby and Amanda set out in pursuit of Amanda
...
He is still alive and
demands water, but the wound is fatal
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Before they catch up to the other
Painballers, they discover the remnants of MaddAddam
...
Although
MaddAddam is prepared to write off Amanda as dead, Ren and Toby
once again pursue her
...

When Toby and Ren find the Painballers and Amanda, they are
unsure what to do
...
While they considering
their options, a third party enters
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Together they
disarm and tie up the Painballers
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Although Ren is worried about the Painballers and Jimmy’s illness,
Toby admonishes everyone to rest
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Before they are able to eat, they hear music
coming their way
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This one is approaching the beach
with torches
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Analysis

Margaret Atwood’s dystopic novel The Year of the Flood is horrifying
and wickedly funny, often at the same time
...
Atwood terms her novels set in the future “speculative
fiction” rather than science fiction
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In The Year of the Flood, the future that results is in most
ways much worse than the present
...

Despite the story’s sensational events, including a pandemic that kills
all but a handful of people, Atwood’s development of the personal
narratives of Toby and Ren is her novel’s most compelling feature
...
The plot alternates between scenes
from the women’s lives after the pandemic and flashbacks to their
earlier lives
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This strategy gives readers multiple ways to
understand the story
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Ren is a young woman at the time of the pandemic, and
her observations are often direct but do not always demonstrate a
deep understanding about what happens around her
...
Only near the end of the novel do
Toby and Ren discover each other, as well as other survivors
...
The earlier novel focused
on Glenn and Jimmy and on Glenn’s creation of a new, ideal human
species and his bioengineering of the plague that wipes out most
people on the planet
...

Before the pandemic, the characters live in a society in which wealthy
people live in gated corporate compounds and others live in the
“pleeblands,” where laws are no longer enforced and CorpSeCorps,
a police force paid for by the corporations, acts in its own interests
...
CorpSeCorps targets are likely to be
ground up to provide meat for the Secret Burger fast food chain
...

Many species in Atwood’s world have become extinct because the
environment has eroded
...
These include the rakunk, a cross
between a raccoon and a skunk; the mo’hair, a sheep with human
hair in colors such as silver, blue, and purple; and the pigoon, a pig
with human brain tissue
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These satirical embodiments of
corporate greed and religious extremism provide opportunities for
humor
...

Overall, tampering with nature is presented as a bad idea
...
In fact, all uses of science
and technology turn out either to be ill-intended or to have bad
effects
...

Because Ren lives in one of the walled compounds for corporate
families during part of her childhood, readers learn about the comfort
and privilege the compounds’ residents enjoy
...
She attends high
school
...

Toby and Ren both belong, for a time, to God’s Gardeners, who treat
environmentalism as a religion
...
The fast-food chain is run by
gangsters whose victims become meals
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Toby eventually gains a leadership position with the Gardeners,
although she never fully embraces their doctrine
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Her mother joins because she
falls in love with Zeb, one of the leaders
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Although the Gardeners are a saner and more likeable alternative to
the corporations, their environmental and religious extremism are an
easy target for Atwood’s satire
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Their leader is called Adam One, and the other members of the
leadership group are all called Adam or Eve with a number
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Their rituals include atrociously bad hymns
...
She successfully
evokes these loftier sources while making the selections she includes
from The God’s Gardeners Oral Hymnbookabsurdly silly
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While their knowledge of plants helps them produce food,
some of the Gardeners use that knowledge to stay stoned most of
the time, evoking a stereotype of environmentalist hippies
...
” One of the Gardeners
even runs a business (without the consent of the group) growing
highly potent marijuana in his apartment
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To prepare, they hide food and
other supplies in caches they call “Ararats,” named after the
mountain where Noah’s Ark came to rest
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The Adams and Eves have computers that they
use only within a hidden room and have connections inside the
corporations
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Academically talented
students from the corporate compounds study science at the
Watson-Crick Institute, but their less successful peers enroll in
humanities courses at the dilapidated Martha Graham Academy
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For the most part, the novel’s gender
roles extend current stereotypes
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The women shop and seek beauty treatments
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Toby’s boss Blanco beats and rapes her
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The women dress
to look like birds or reptiles, and they perform for the guests on
trapezes
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The most violent men end up in prison, where they play games of
“painball
...
Fans watching on television choose favorites and
gamble on the sport
...
He survives the plague, and he and another
painballer continue chasing Toby
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These new people mate only when the female comes into

season
...

Humor and satire are not the only features that keep The Year of the
Flood from being extremely grim
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The most important
friendships are between women
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Toby helps Ren find
Amanda after the escaped painballers abduct her
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Toby and Ren have tied up the painballers, who sit with
them
...
Jimmy, Ren’s
high school boyfriend whom she cannot stop thinking about, is also
at the campfire but is so badly injured that he does not recognize her
or seem to know where he is
...

This ending leaves many questions about who will survive and what
the resolution will be
...
The likelihood that Blanco can be reformed after pursuing
Toby for years is slim, but his fate is left uncertain as the painballers
may escape or die
...
The main characters have left
the Gardeners’ Eden, which was anything but innocent and idyllic,
and have survived the great flood, but Atwood has not yet revealed
whether the world cleansed by the flood is better or worse than the

one that came before it
...
Until that occurs,
readers can speculate as to what utopian or dystopian world these
characters might create

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