What happens when you get the apocalypse you wished for? That’s what a band of eco-subversives called the Gardeners find out in Margaret Atwood’s Year of the Flood, a story of humanity destroyed for meddling too much with the environment.
Set in the near future, Year of the Flood is a retelling of Margaret Atwood’s apocalyptic classic Oryx and Crake from the perspective of characters who were only marginally involved in the massive act of bioterror unleashed by the previous novel’s sociopathic Utopian scientist Glenn (AKA Crake). While Glenn and his damaged, upper-class buddies were cooking up a virus to end the world, the peaceful Green separatist Gardeners lived in squats, tending vast urban rooftop gardens. The Gardeners’ leader, who goes by the name Adam One, preaches a kind of new agey Catholic environmentalism, complete with days devoted to saints (like Saint Rachel Carson) and hymns.
