my bucket of brain bleach, or: thoughts on reading Atwood's The Year of the Flood

this is the afore-mentioned bucket of brain bleach which i was so heartily craving just earlier this week.

after much consternation at a corporate bookstore (corpbook? bookcorps?) yesterday, i gleaned a book by a classic favorite of mine, Margaret Atwood. i wasn't aware that she had a new book out; i also did not know that there would be more than one work set in the oryx & crake -verse. needless to say, bookcorps got some of my hard-earned e bucks and i have been reading since, except for when i'm driving, which i'm doing as little as possible in order to read this book.

but like taking huge gulps of very cold water, i must stop in the middle of my refreshment to share exactly how good it is, lest i choke.

she opens with a reference to one of her poems. she uses an image that i've always loved: the rising sun as egg. it's stuck in my head ever since i read it, in a book, i think, that Nick gave me. at this point i leaned back and smiled, under the care of a master, like the veil of consecration that the perfectly strung chord settles around in silence.

clever wordplay, of course, as usual, abounds. Atwood's puns and references are sharp; Atwood's neologisms and doublespeak blush the cheek of even Our Dear Orwell. this technical, wordchoice and word creation stuff is where i see most telling evidence of Atwood's poetic artistry.

many a story has suffered, however, perhaps in some part due to an author's poetic proficiency. poetic proficiency may well be the reason that 90% of the amazing things that have been written languish without denouement or any real story at all, off in a drawer or dusty unused notebook. naturally, such is not Atwood's case. if anything, her poetic sensibility is a rocket jetpack to the story, compelling it forward. motifs and repetitions frame out a rhythm, as well as create reference to the prior work, Oryx & Crake. the secretive private military/intelligence company, the CorpSecCorps, returns in TYOTF. please, take a moment, and if you've not, read that out loud. Atwood knows what she's doing, here, reader. the name of this particular company comes at punctuated intervals throughout the text, creating a rhythm of crunch thudding tactical boots. i'm going to have to re-read to determine it, but i'm thinking it's quite possible that Atwood creates some conditioning scenarios through her stories to elicit a Pavlovian-style response in her readers - mentions of the CorpSecCorps in this book about make my heart jump out of my chest. (What I am currently puzzling is whether Atwood means us to have the same reaction about our current setting's counterpart - Blackwater, turned Ze. Xe? Something like that.)

of course, mentioning either the fictional or real companies in print/text is not something that many of the characters in TYOTF would do. any instance of a fictional work discussing text, writing, meaning, and words is worth closer consideration. this is another part of the work that will bear revisiting but the characters in TYOTF have peculiar relationships with the written word - and above all, so far, it would seem that words/writing are to be taken as a body of evidence. text is proof of something - whether in the environment (in TYOTF, graffiti covers public/lower class spaces, while it is conspicuously absent in the corporate compounds) or proof of one's transgressions. characters reiterate the idea that one's enemies can/will/do use one's written communications as proof of wrongdoing, and of course the powers that be have set people against each other/themselves in order to dominate more successfully. in broader terms, communication is problematic, at best. at worst, it invites torture or includes the possibility of betraying friends or family. when Atwood, the writer, asks the reader what it means when the reader can use the work of the writer against the writer, what does this mean? In part, it is an acknowledgement that the written word is both more persistent and just as fragile/mutable as the flesh. Atwood's story also intimates that there is a certain type of authority that will burn both, according to its purposes.

concepts of an authoritarian power structure repeat from prior works, as in The Handmaid's Tale. However, the religious authority in TYOTF is, for now, a sort of refuge; certainly it is not the source of power. the authority approach to religions is explained fairly succintly - there are a couple of consumption-oriented, feel-good materialist sects for those elites who wish to have them, most people are secular and then the poverty stricken fringe includes those who work with the establishment (though in the shadows), those who are ignored by it and those who have resources the establishment covets - these last are the only ones labeled terrorist.

(i found that last point to be so sharp that i do not wish to comment further upon it. it stands alone.)


this is not a book that can be examined well in a blog posting, or perhaps not on a blog at all. several of these ideas require examination and there are others i'd like to explore, particularly that of the question of the unreliable narrator/media.