The late poet Al Purdy thought he was joking when he gave young Margaret Atwood a copy of an outdoorsy book called The Art of Survival to commemorate the publication of her early critical study, Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Neither of them could have known that the joke present would become a rich lode of material for a world-famous novelist almost 40 years later.
Few people actually survived in The Art of Survival, Atwood recalled in a summer conversation at a bustling, noisy restaurant near her midtown Toronto home, her affect-free voice matching an apparently deadpan manner that, close up, twitches with intelligence. “What it really was,” she says, “was horror stories of people who didn't survive and what they did wrong, with gruesome photos.”
Those stories joined a growing trove of knowledge gleaned from similar explorations, especially the lost-in-the-woods Canadiana she absorbed as a youth: how to snare a rabbit, how to skin a porcupine, where to find all-important lipids. “If you really think you're starving, turn over a few logs,” she advises. “You can eat grasshoppers, crickets, anything that looks like a shrimp except it's not a shrimp.”
Such is the strange knowledge that rattles around the mind of an “old” person, according to Atwood. “It's like junk in your house. It accumulates.” But not uselessly: Some of the last-named arthropods – maggots, in a word – play a key role in the life and adventures of Toby, the tough, super-survivor heroine of Atwood's new novel, The Year of the Flood.
In the post-apocalyptic future Toby inhabits, maggots are both food and medicine. Indeed they are one of the few wholly benign creatures left in a world teeming with the misbegotten results of genetic tinkering – Day-Glo sheep, pigs with human brain power and dangerous “liobams” created by a literal-minded religious cult determined to make the lion lie down with the lamb.
“Have I ever eaten maggots?” Atwood repeats the question, but doesn't drop a beat. “Perhaps inadvertently. I have never gathered them and had a fry-up with them. But I have eaten snake. It was quite good.”
What the book absolutely is not, she insists, is science fiction
Survival is no metaphor in The Year of the Flood. It is the immediate priority of all humanity – at least the fraction that survives the flood in question, called “waterless” by the fictional cultists who predicted it. Atwood describes the event as something like a worldwide outbreak of the Ebola-Marburg virus, producing “a hemorrhagic, dissolve-from-the-inside kind of fever.”
Like Sodom and Gomorrah, much of the world it wipes out is hopelessly corrupt – a degenerate geography of high-security enclaves housing the pampered and feckless in isolation from the civic squalor of “pleebland,” where bloodthirsty rapists rule the streets and fast-food franchises serve up human remains.
Atwood seems indignant at the suggestion that the future she imagines is uniformly horrible. “It's bad news for some, but good news for others,” she insists, pointing out that “the birds are doing better” in her future.
“It could be much worse,” she adds. “It could be a nuclear book in which everything is grey and burnt.”
As an example of non-horrific details in her imagined future, the author offers “Chickie-Nobs,” future fast food derived from birds grown without heads. “The chickens wouldn't suffer,” she notes. “If you grew them in battery farms they wouldn't be suffering because they wouldn't have heads.”
Then there is the “Mo'hair,” a brightly coloured wig grown with the wearer's own genetic material. “I'd like to be able to order up some bright hair,” she declares.
“People are fooling with the toy box, and you might get something quite good out of it,” she says. But most of the future she imagines is bad, bad, bad.
What the book absolutely is not, she insists, is science fiction – a statement she has made repeatedly since the 2003 publication of Oryx and Crake, a novel that shares the same future as Flood and some of the same characters.
