The views expressed in the Writer-in-Residence blogs are those held by the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Open Book: Toronto.
SWINE FLU AND THE WATERLESS FLOOD
Submitted by lrogers on September 2, 2009 - 12:09pm
I recently apologised to The Queen of Canlit, now languishing in the gilded unlike antechamber to Heaven or Hell known as pre-publication, while the Lord of Canscam, our national emblem of anti-redemption, waits without the comfort of his silicone enhanced bride for yet another appeal to be turned down.
Cassandra to our collective Pollyannas, Atwood has been telling it like it's gonna be, and some of us didn't want to hear about swine flu or Armageddon.
The big question is, in hard times, while Lord Noir's only court of last resort is on his knees, can we/she still believe in miracles?
Following is a snip from my review of Atwood's fall novel, The Year of the Flood, which is in the upcoming issue of The Pacific Rim Review of Books, one of the few reviews left standing, if only because of the stubbornness of its editors.
We could call Atwood the angel of redemption if she would let us get away with that. Her own intellectual rigour precludes that possibility. Redemption is too easy, a “pawnshop” concept, and so we are left with the buzzing of lesser angels, mosquitoes taking meaty nips out of the conventional morality and chewing it up to make “special” paper, the kind that might get past the tree police. “… paper was sinful because it was made from the flesh of trees.”
With Payback, her recent Massey lectures, and the new novel, The Year of the Flood, a record of the Waterless Flood, a plague that is the nemesis of so-called “civilization,” she offers a multi-layered, multi-textured justification for the end of the human species, which has defaced the gold standard of God’s first holy law, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
You have to wait for the rest.
