The Year of the Flood

The Year of the Flood is Margaret Atwood's follow-up to Oryx and Crake, although the action takes place in the same world simultaneously, so you don't need to have read that one to enjoy this one. I got an advance reading copy from the local college bookstore; this novel will be for sale on 9/22/09. And then you should read it.

I got to sit in the back of an overcrowded auditorium at the local college a couple of years ago and hear Margaret Atwood talk about her writing, focusing mostly on Oryx and Crake. It was a very good performance, and the line to have her sign a book afterwards was so long that I had to give it up, finally.

Those of you who follow this blog know that The Handmaid's Tale is a novel I think everyone ought to read. I didn't feel the same way about Oryx and Crake--it seemed a little on the SF side for some. But I do feel that way about The Year of the Flood. A recent interview with Atwood indicates that she's planning a third novel set in this world, so I'll be waiting anxiously for that!

Why do I think everyone ought to read this novel? The short answer is that it takes some of the things that intelligent people are most anxious about and shakes them up together to pose new and more interesting questions about what we can possibly do about any of this. Rather than escapist zombie fiction or a weighty ecological tome, The Year of the Flood is a novel that manages to explore the consequences of how we live now--particularly how we've been treating the environment and our attitude towards the inevitable pandemics to come--by showing the effects on a group of characters that includes someone with whom every reader will be able to identify. As another blog reviewer points out, no matter what you believe, this novel will "give you fits" and make you think.

The long answer is that there are so many pleasures in this novel that I can't possibly tell you about all of them. But here are a few examples. The novel includes hymns that the "God's Gardeners" sing for different occasions in the year, including predator day, when they praise the intelligence and agility of all predators, and "April Fish" day, which has some similarities to April Fool's day. It also includes short sermons by Adam One of the Gardeners, including this section on "Creation Day":
"The Human Words of God speak of the Creation in terms that could be understood by the men of old. There is no talk of galaxies or genes, for such terms would have confused them greatly! But must we therefore take as scientific fact the story that the world was created in six days, thus making a nonsense of observable data? God cannot be held to the narrowness of literal and materialistic interpretations, nor measured by Human measurements, for His days are like eons, and a thousand ages of our time are like an evening to Him. Unlike some other religions, we have never felt it served a higher purpose to lie to children about geology."

Despite such scathing sections, though, the characters generally show humility about what they do and understand and even what they feel. On "April Fish" day, Adam One says that "to be an April Fish is to humbly accept and wear the label of God's Fools gladly, for in relation to God we are all fools, no matter how wise we may think we are." And at another point, a character recalls her previous attitude towards a certain group and realizes "we shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young."

At the same time, though, the Gardeners have human failings:
"You'll want to grow your hair," said Nuala. "Get rid of that scalped look. We Gardener women all wear our hair long."
When Toby asked why, she was given to understand that the aesthetic preference was God's. This kind of smiling, bossy sanctimoniousness was a little too pervasive for Toby, especially among the female members of the sect."
What I like most about Toby, who rises to the highest level in God's Gardeners, an "Eve," is that she has doubts, and she doesn't hesitate to express them. And I like that what she is able to do because of living with the Gardeners turns out to be more important.

The flood of the title is a plague (if you've read Oryx and Crake, you know who unleashed the plague and how). The Gardeners call it "the waterless flood" because it wipes out most previous life on earth. The flood is the focal point of the novel; we find out what the characters were doing before, during and immediately afterwards.

Some of the fun of the novel lies in the variety of genetically engineered animals the characters encounter, some of them already familiar to readers of Oryx and Crake, and others not. The "liobam," for instance, is a "lion-sheep splice...commissioned by the Lion Isaiahists, keen to force the advent of the Peaceable Kingdom. They'd reasoned that the only way to fulfil the lion/lamb friendship prophecy without the first eating the second would be to meld the two of them together. But the result hadn't been strictly vegetarian."

For readers of Oryx and Crake there are extra pleasures, including stories about the adolescence of "Crake" and Jimmy and a little about what happened to Jimmy's mother when she left the gated community where she had lived and worked. I enjoyed it when the character Toby, living alone in the former health spa where she has weathered the "flood," sees the genetically engineered people created by Crake in the distance and she thinks they're a hallucination, with their "blue abdomens" and their "crystalline, otherworldly singing."

When you begin reading this novel, you may be, like me, someone who "knew there were things wrong in the world....But the wrong things were wrong somewhere else." By the time you finish it, you'll be less able to "live with such fears and keep on whistling." You'll want to do something. Maybe just one more small thing. Because this novel shows you how much small things can matter. By extension, how much you can matter. How much you already do matter.

Finger Lickin' Fifteen

Lately when I read reviews and comments on book blogs, some lines from the Sondheim musical "Into the Woods" start going through my head: "You're so NICE...you're not good, you're not bad, you're just NICE..." Because a lot of bookish bloggers are increasingly unwilling to publish a bad review. There are a lot of reasons for this, and some of them are good ones. But I'm not going to join the crowd. Sometimes I read a book and I think afterwards that I wish I could have the time back that I wasted reading that one! Perhaps I should make this a weekly meme--thumbs down Thursday, or something. (Ok, I think that popped into my mind because of the recent musing over at Opiate of the Masses about starting memes like "Bodacious Tata Thursday.")

The book I read this week and didn't like is Janet Evanovich's Finger Lickin' Fifteen. It's too bad, because I liked all fourteen of the previous Stephanie Plum novels, and even one of the "between the numbers" novels she came out with, Plum Spooky. When I look back at my review of Fearless Fourteen, though, I see that I didn't like the writing or the relationship between Stephanie and Ranger or Morelli as much as in the previous ones. Mostly I was in the mood for the silliness about video game terms. Well, in fifteen the writing has literally descended to the level of fart jokes. The reason Stephanie can't choose between Ranger and Morelli is so contrived that it reminds me of the last season of an old tv show, Moonlighting, in which the sexual tension between the two main characters was such a vital ingredient in the show's success that the writers went to ludicrous lengths for weeks and weeks to keep the characters from getting together. Even Grandma Mazur, who was good for comic relief in the previous novels, isn't funny explaining why old women love exhibitionists and cooking with Lula.

Lula, also previously good comic relief, becomes more of a two-dimensional character in this book. You'd think that characters once fleshed out (generously, in Lula's case) couldn't go backwards, but that's exactly what Janet Evanovich has achieved in Finger Lickin' Fifteen. Even the junk food of the title is robbed of its fun in this one, as it's obviously something only the young can indulge in. I'm sorry, Ranger fans, but Ranger is old in this book--he's too old to eat junk and still look good. Morelli doesn't appear much, so I declare him the winner in the contest for Stephanie--at least he still seems fun.

No one who appears in Finger Lickin' Fifteen comes off well. The book is like a joke that's been told once too often. If you have to find out for yourself, go ahead, but you can believe what I'm telling you about this one because "I'm not good, I'm not nice, I'm just right."

I think being right about book reviews is more important than being nice. (Do you disagree? Tell me why in the comments!)

Tea Time For The Traditionally Built

Tea Time for the Traditionally Built, by Alexander McCall Smith, was a birthday present from my family, so I read it while lounging in the wading pool on what turned out to be a rather cool but extravagantly sunny day, and it was quite a pleasant way to read about the heat and dust of Botswana. In this latest volume (previously reviewed: Morality for Beautiful Girls and The Miracle at Speedy Motors), Mma Ramotswe's "tiny white van" can no longer be repaired and the ever-thoughtful Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni replaces it with a medium-sized blue one. I've puzzled over how a van can be tiny since I began reading these books; I got a slightly better idea in France, where even vans are made very narrow.

As usual, once I relaxed into the slow pace of the writing, the charms of the way Mma Ramotswe thinks about even the smallest of tasks become apparent. She gets up early one morning and enjoys "the brief private time before the others would get up and start making demands of her. There would be breakfast to prepare, children's clothes to find, husband's clothes to find too; there would be a hundred things to do." But she resolves to take the advice of the person who told her that "our concern should be what is happening right now. 'There is plenty of work for love to do'....Yes, one should not worry too much." I think a mother of teenagers might want to reread that section every night before going to bed.

There are always incidental pleasures in reading about Mma Ramotswe's daily rounds. I loved her description of Sherlock Holmes: "He was a very famous detective....Over that way....He lived in London. He is late now."

We find out the name of the younger apprentice in this book, and even get to see where he lives. Mma Ramotswe finds that he understands how she feels about the loss of the tiny white van, and realizes "how easy it is to misjudge the young, to imagine that they share none of the more complex emotions that shape our lives as we grow older."

My favorite scene in this book centers around the extended description of Mma Ramotswe's premonition that something bad will happen to Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni on a day trip he is taking. Like my father's premonitions always are, hers is wrong, and when she sees him getting out of his truck at the end of the day "she stopped her van where it was, some yards short of its normal place at the side of the house, and she got out and ran to him, the lights of the van still burning." The even-more-often-than-usual references to the way she is "traditionally built" throughout this book make the scene poignant and funny at the same time.

Also Mma Makutsi gets a new pair of shoes in this one. I also got a new pair of shoes as a birthday present, and some "red bush tea" from the cafe at Borders. Have you noticed that they carry it there now?

A Birthday Poem

Today I'm 29 again! I'll be spending the day outside.

Usually I like to take my kids to the pool or the lake, but today they have summer gym and then Walker has a scheduled chess demonstration from one of his teachers--the one who lives in Serbia--so we'll have to stick close to home. I might fill up a wading pool and read beside it in my back yard (despite the fact that our black cat Chester always ends up puncturing any inflatable parts when he presses down on one side so he can get a drink). The green and flowered wilderness of our yard is a lovely place to spend an afternoon with a book.

A Birthday Poem, by Ted Kooser

Just past dawn, the sun stands
with its heavy red head
in a black stanchion of trees,
waiting for someone to come
with his bucket
for the foamy white light,
and then a long day in the pasture.
I too spend my days grazing,
feasting on every green moment
till darkness calls,
and with the others
I walk away into the night,
swinging the little tin bell
of my name.

Yes, I think I'll be outside until the cows come home--they live diagonally across the street and over the hill. You can see them lying in the shade under the tree in the bottom photo.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

It was a review at A Bookworm's World that first made me want to read Alan Bradley's The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, mostly because Luanne calls it "Harriet the spy for grownups." And when I got around to reading it, I was delighted to find that the 11-year-old heroine, Flavia de Luce, does occasionally remind me of my favorite 11-year-old heroine, Harriet: "I was me. I was Flavia. And I loved myself, even if no one else did." I wouldn't call either Flavia or Harriet unreliable narrators, exactly, but part of the charm of their first-person narration is the fallibility of some of their observations--not because they're not intelligent enough to interpret what they're seeing, but because they're both only eleven, and don't necessarily have enough context yet to recognize everything they're seeing for what it is: "whenever she was thinking about Ned, Feely played Schumann. I suppose that's why they call it romantic music."

Flavia does not fancy herself a spy, but takes the part of Janie in terms of her hobby (she's a chemist). Her spying is part of her curious nature; when she discovers a body in the garden, she takes it upon herself to solve the mystery of how it got there, and along the way, she shows her intense loyalty to her reticent family circle. She gets around on her bike, which she calls Gladys, and she is tolerated and given considerable free rein by the Inspector assigned to the case, who gets to recite the lines of poetry from which the title is derived and politely declines to tell Flavia why the symbol for her in his notes is a "P."

Although Flavia figures out that the murdered man died from an injection of carbon tetrachloride just from smelling his last breath, she misses the fact that her family's cook knows no one in the family likes custard pie and so she makes one occasionally to take home to her own husband. Like the cook in Harriet the Spy, Mrs. Mullet doesn't always have enough patience to deal with the resident child genius, and when she laughs at Flavia, even Flavia is aware that "something in me that was less than noble rose up out of the depths, and I was transformed in the blink of an eye into Flavia the Pigtailed Avenger." That she can see herself this way indicates some potential for either increasing egalitarianism or noblesse oblige as she gets older.

In the end, Flavia figures out the mystery, although she has to have some help capturing the murderer. And this is only the first of her adventures; Bradley promises a series of mysteries featuring Flavia.

Briar Rose

Another of the books we shared while traveling this summer was Jane Yolen's novella-length retelling of Briar Rose, a lovely mystery tale in which an adult granddaughter pieces together the story her grandmother used to tell with what turns out to be her grandmother's untold Holocaust story.

As in all good fairy tales, the elements of the story all turn out to be true in some way. The grandmother really was a princess. She really was put under a spell and then woke up. She was rescued by a prince. But that's only the surface of the story. Part of the reason the grandmother kept retelling the story throughout her life is that it has depths, and every time she tells another part, her granddaughters understand more, especially when they ask questions. For instance, when the prince comes, he
"sang, too, and as he added his voice to theirs, it was as if he witnessed all their deaths in the thorns. It was as if he had knowledge of all their lives, past and present and future....
How can they have any future lives if they're dead?....
The future is when people talk about the past. So if the prince knows all their past lives and tells all the people who are still to come, then the princes live again and into the future."

The charm of this tale is in the way it unfolds, bit by fragile bit, until you understand how all the pieces fit together, better even than the grandmother ever understood it herself. And also in the way the story is continued by the granddaughter as she comes to understand the courage of the heroes, who are "all sleeping princesses some time" but know "it is better to be fully awake."

This is not a bed-time story. It is a story to make you come fully awake, not because of lurid horrors--it's not that kind of Holocaust tale--but because you'll see more if you make your way through life with your eyes opened.

Interworld

Clearly I was on some sort of Neil Gaiman kick during June, because in addition to re-reading some of the stories from M is for Magic, I also read Interworld, by Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves. It was one of the best of the YA titles we took with us on our trip to France. The idea was that we could read them and then trade them around, getting more (literal) mileage out of each book because as fellow travelers know, books get heavy fast when you try to pack them.

The one we all liked least was Margaret Peterson Haddix's Found. We weren't expecting to like it as much as her stellar Just Ella, but we did expect to like it as much as Running Out of Time, (which we read before the Shyamalan movie The Village came out) or Leaving Fishers. We thought it would be something like her Shadow Children series, which we all enjoyed. One of the main differences between the Shadow Children series and this new "The Missing" series, of which Found is the first one, is that Found is longer than Among the Hidden or any of its sequels. I think it's possible that Found would be better if it were more severely edited. But maybe it's partly that we're all older than Haddix's targeted sixth-grade audience.

The one we liked slightly better, mostly for the sake of its bad jokes, is Dale E. Basye's Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go. From the moment that "goodbye puppy" merchandise is mentioned, I was willing to give this book a chance. The jokes come at a good pace, accompanied by allusions like
"Where are we going?" Milton said with a motivating clap of his hands.
"The Surface!" Marlo and Virgil replied in unison.
"When are we getting there?"
"Real soon!"
For you non-Buckaroo Banzai fans, that's an allusion to some memorable dialogue and implicitly compares the "heroes" of the book to a bunch of really stupid aliens. But, in the end, we weren't pleased to find that this book is little more than an elaborate prologue to a second one, and our enjoyment of bad jokes goes only so far.

So when I got to Interworld, I was pleased that it had a plot and a main character I could sympathize with, even if the science is brought down to the young adult level by explanations like
"the thing to remember is that certain decisions--important ones, those that can create major ripples in the time stream--can cause alternate worlds to splinter off into divergent space-time continua. Remember this, or you'll wind up paralyzed every time you have to make a choice: The Altiverse is not going to create a brave new world based on your decision to wear green socks today instead of red ones. Or if it does, that world will only last a few femtoseconds before being recycled into the reality it split off from."
The plot is based on the idea that there is a power struggle between worlds where magic works and worlds where science works, and the hero has been recruited into an organization that attempts to keep a balance between the power of science and the power of magic:
"We of InterWorld have no problem with either ideology. Our problem is with HEX and with the Binary, who both seek to impose their belief systems and method of reality on other worlds--sometimes through war, sometimes more subtly."

Interworld has jokes; we all reacted to this one:
...I...looked at Jo, particularly at the two things that made her so different from me.
"Stop staring."
"I'm sorry," I said. "It's just, where I come from, nobody has wings."

And, finally Interworld has a satisfying hero-saves-the-universe ending, complete with a big explosion:
"And then she blew, and it was wonderful. It was like a light show and a fireworks show and the destruction of Sauron's tower...everything you could imagine it could be."

And now, it's about time for fireworks shows all across the U.S. You could do worse than take a couple of hours to read Interworld before (or after) your local fireworks display.