![]() ![]() But then, as Atwood has always said, everything she writes about is possible and much of it has already happened. As with The Handmaid’s Tale and the rise of the misogynist right in the US, the passing of time has made her work seem ever more eerily prophetic. The Year of the Flood is the middle book in Atwood’s dystopian MaddAddam trilogy, published between 20. The fragility of human endeavour and the terrifying consequences of our choices are the message to take from this devastating book. He grapples not only with human suffering and savagery on a baroque, almost unimaginable scale with faith, love and the blunt urge to survive but with the existential horror of the possible end of the human race. McCarthy writes in an unrelenting, declamatory prose somewhere between the Bible and late Beckett, stripped for the most part of the adornment of apostrophes and speech marks and the breathing space provided by commas. This is a hard book to read but also, as Andrew O’Hagan put it, “the first great masterpiece of the globally warmed generation”. The father keeps a pistol by him, to kill his son and then himself when the time comes the mother committed suicide years before. ![]() ![]() Nine years on, if the man and boy meet other humans, they will almost certainly be raped and eaten. Survivors descended into “bloodcults”, savagery and cannibalism. In the first years after the catastrophe, the roads were crowded with refugees, foraging remaining food stocks. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |