The way we live now

“The Year of the Flood’’ starts off at a pitch of sensory intensity that hooks the reader immediately. It’s just after a catastrophe called the Waterless Flood has devastated the earth, sometime in the near future noted only as “Year Twenty-Five.’’ Toby, one of two women who at first appear to be the only survivors, is watching the sunrise from her rooftop refuge. “As the first heat hits, mist rises from among the swath of trees between her and the derelict city. The air smells faintly of burning, a smell of caramel and tar and rancid barbecues, and the ashy but greasy smell of a garbage-dump fire after it’s been raining. The abandoned towers in the distance are like the coral of an ancient reef - bleached and colourless, devoid of life. . . . The sun brightens in the east, reddening the blue-grey haze that marks the distant ocean. The vultures roosting on hydro poles fan out their wings to dry them, opening themselves like black umbrellas.’’

If “The Year of the Flood’’ had continued at this level of sensory immersion, the post-apocalyptic world Atwood creates could have been as vividly and deeply experienced as the battle scenes in “War and Peace.’’ But Atwood has a different agenda. The novel is divided into 14 sections, each introduced by a hymn from a religious cult called God’s Gardeners and a sermon by the sect’s leader, Adam One. The hymns read like secular versions of actual religious songs - a kind of High Doggerel - and the sermons ape with stunning accuracy the ponderous, snooze-inducing rhetoric of actual sermons. This reader’s temptation - as strong as in real life - to skip both hymns and sermons testifies to Atwood’s skill as a parodist. Within its sections the novel alternates point of view between two survivors - Toby, a middle-aged herbal healer, and Ren, a young erotic dancer. Each of the women’s stories shuttles between past (pre-Flood) and present (post-Flood).