![]() ![]() Science can do more or less anything and biliously coloured engineered sheep share meadows with luminous green rabbits and the bleating roar of a sheep-lion hybrid. ![]() So far, so Wellsian these dystopias have always depended on variations on the Morlocks and the Eloi. ![]() The rest – pleebrats – live outside in slums. The rich live within exquisite gated communities, guarded by the CorpSeCorps militia. Far in the future, states have collapsed authority is wielded by immense corporations and their security forces. The drama plays out with a much ampler sense of its own world. She seems, I think, to have relaxed into her future of biological inventions, the grotesque backdrop made up of wilful scientific manipulation of organic materials. The Year of the Flood is a sort of loose sequel to Atwood's 2003 Oryx and Crake. When the brilliant performance starts to fall apart, as it does towards the end, we can only reflect that here is a subject that would defeat almost any novelist. Margaret Atwood clearly is that novelist and The Year of the Flood is, for the most part, the work of a marvellously confident and intricate imagination. But surely only a writer very confident of her powers decides to write a novel about the end of the world. ![]() T here are any number of subjects that a novelist can take on – two people falling in love in Sussex, a race against time to foil a bomb plot, the entry into politics of a Victorian transvestite. ![]()
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