Atwood's writing, freed from the exacting confines of her more lauded 'literary' works, is exemplary, and her skills at world-building are terrific. The world of Flood is a lonely and terrifying place, and Atwood details with precision exactly the path humanity took to get there. The near-future is a place of corporate-run government (particularly the omnipresent CorpSeCorps), where animal species are dying out at the rate of hundreds a month, and science and religion battle over who gets the hearts and minds of the citizenry. Far more so than Oryx and Crake (which mentioned God's Gardeners only briefly), Atwood concentrates on the religious aspect of humanity's future, a future of strange offshoots of accepted religious practices, sometimes with exceedingly strange results. But Atwood does not take the easy path and subject the beliefs of her characters to ridicule (and how easy that would have been). Her sensitive treatment of the various cults and the security and comfort they can offer lonely individuals is commendable. As Adam One preaches, humans have evolved to believe in a higher power, and it is only logical that in the face of utter bleakness (and how bleak it does become), people seek reason for their misery, if only in the undefined actions of a nebulous authority figure.


Read the rest of the review here.