Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone

I haven’t read any of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s other novels, but having read Americanah I certainly intend to. Americanah is a beautifully brave novel, whose rawness matters more than my frustration with the occasionally overstretched shape of the overarching narrative, the love story of Ifemelu and Obinze. I say the novel is brave because it tackles questions of race, economic migration and poverty openly; anger is rightfully owned, prejudice is expected from all angles, but with a welcome lack of sentimentality: this is not a novel to encourage priviledged weeping and ensuing charity. Whilst this can occasionally give the novel a polemical feel, it is a polemic that should be at the centre of the international world growing around us.

Ifemelu is the outspoken, honest heart of the novel, and we follow her journey from Nigeria to America and back. We enter her story as she is on the brink of return to Nigeria, and through a series of regressions in time we experience love, university strikes in Nigeria, becoming black in America, learning to live in America, and then returning home to a changed Nigeria. Her high school and university boyfriend, Obinze, allows for a glimpse of a similar journey to England and back. Ifemelu’s views are refreshing because they allow for contradiction. You can love and hate a place at the same time. You can be nostalgic about home but still want it to change.

What the novel expresses so clearly is the idea of choice as the greatest of riches. It is something most white middle-class Western European, North American people do not think about. Choice is taken for granted. When Ifemelu goes back to Nigeria, her friend turns off the generator at night, and ‘soon Ifemelu was tossing in the wetness of her own sweat. A painful throbbing had started behind her eyes and a mosquito was buzzing nearby and she felt suddenly, guiltily grateful that she had a blue American passport in her bag. It shielded her from choicelessness. She could always leave; she did not have to stay’ (end of Chapter 44).

Americanah should be on the Bailey’s Prize for Fiction short list this year. I hope, unlike We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulowayo, which was shortlisted for the Booker and which explored similar themes, though in a very different way, it actually wins. Though the messages do sometimes overcome the writing, they are an integral part of Ifemelu’s journey and it is a journey we should all be more familiar with.

Next week I’m reading Little Egypt by Lesley Glaister followed by Beauty by Sarah Pinborough. I’m nearly half way through the year of reading a book a week. Look out for my ‘favourites so far’ post coming soon.

The last A. M. Homes book I read, The End of Alice, was a disappointment. It took an interesting kernel of an idea, the musings of a paedophile in prison, and left it unfurled. I approached this book, therefore, with a kind of sceptical curiosity. I would have read May We Be Forgiven, which won the Women’s Prize for fiction last year, but This Book Will Save Your Life was an amazon steal at 99p. Sad, but true, that the price of fiction does sometimes dictate my reading…

So with all of that as background I was pleasantly surprised by This Book Will Save Your Life. Despite being about a man’s mid-life crisis, This Book Will Save Your Life was wonderfully refreshing. Richard, white, in his fifties, rich and living alone in LA with a cleaner, a nutritionist and a personal trainer substituting for a social life, has a panic attack that wrenches him from his solitude and forces him to reconsider his life. The book becomes his fight to reconnect with life, family, desire, and most particularly his son with whom he hasn’t had regular contact for years. It feels a little like reading a Douglas Coupland novel: very American, faintly surreal and sceptically new age. Donuts, those sugary, fatty, carb diet disasters play a huge part in awakening Richard to emotions and feelings long suppressed and he finds himself behaving with an unusual altruism that muddles and brightens his life.

This Book Will Save Your Life is a quirky and well-crafted account of one man’s struggle to find himself, to be honest with himself. The careful writing and socially cushioned characters provide a safe environment for the reader, regardless of some of the personal dangers Richard encounters, and though that makes for a comforting read, the book ends up being more pleasurable than provocative. Despite my pleasure reading the book, I again come away from an A. M. Homes novel wanting more. She writes well enough to raise my expectations. I hope the next book of hers I read will meet those expectations.

Next week I’m reading Amaricanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, followed by Little Egypt by Lesley Glaister and Beauty by Sarah Pinborough.

The Trick is to Keep Breathing navigates the grief and depression of its protagonist, Joy, following the death of her separated but married lover, Michael. Michael drowns in the pool on their first holiday together in Spain. Joy’s inability to speak Spanish gives Michael’s death a frighteningly surreal quality, almost as if she is wading through a world she can’t breath in. She brings this world home with her.

Though her breakdown follows Michael’s death, it’s clear from Joy’s behaviour that submissive emotional fragility has been part of her life for a long time, and learning to step out of that behaviour is possibly the only way Joy is going to get better. What should she get better for, though? Her best friend has gone to work in America, her mother is dead, her elder sister is terrifying and though she has men in her life, they are like stiff drinks rather than relationships – they put a little fire in her belly, but give her a headache the next day. She feels she has no control over her life and the only step she can take towards taking control herself is to control what she eats – as little as possible – and to persuade the doctors that she needs a rest in a mental institute where she spends a large portion of the novel.

There is much to admire in the construction of the novel. I like the fragmented nature of the text: the lists, the occasional script layout, the notes in the margins, the memories of Spain in a poetical kind of repetitious italics, the letters. The book reads like the dislocated diary it is. However, I’d hoped for more. I’m interested in women using their bodies to express their suffering, refusing to nourish themselves and offering their physical self in place of their whole self, allowing sex to stand in for emotional connection. But somehow, The Trick is to Keep Breathing just didn’t move me.

Joy reads books, backs of cereal boxes, anything really, hoping to make sense of things, a hope not dissimilar to my own. I don’t hope for ‘the truth’ though, as I’m not sure it’s a graspable thing. I do, however, hope to find ‘glimpses of things just beyond the reach of understanding’ (p196) and The Trick is to Keep Breathing did reveal a few glimpses just not as many as I’d imagined it might. I think The Trick is to Keep Breathing is a well-written and interesting novel, and for the right reader, it could prove life-changing. Sadly, that reader is not me, but it could be you…

Next week I’m reading This Book Will Save Your Life by A. M. Homes, followed by Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Please do make book suggestions for future weeks.

 

The Machine is an eerie read that questions not only our faith in the mindlessness of computers, but also our faith in our safety as we mindlessly use computers. Set in a not too distant future, the world has been ravaged by climate change and England, devastated by flooding, now endures the intense heat and monsoon type rains of a tropical climate.

Beth, the main protagonist, has moved to the Isle of Wight to escape the prying eyes and unwanted sympathy she received on the mainland. Her husband, Vic, came back from a war in Iran with severe shell shock and was offered the miracle memory cure of the machine. Like so many others with post-traumatic stress syndrome, Beth and Vic were desperate to improve their lives and like all the others who tested the machine’s new therapy, they come to regret opting for the machine. The treatment wipes bad memories from its subjects’ minds and replaces the gaps with cover stories (in Vic’s case they even doctor wedding photographs in an attempt to wipe out his memory of being or even wanting to be a soldier, and they change the way in which Vic and Beth met), but along with the bad much else is wiped as well. Vic, as with all the others, becomes a hollowed out man, barely even able to remember to breath let alone speak. He is in a special hospice lying on rubber sheets.

Not surprisingly, these failures cause huge outcry and the machines are banned, even for restorative use – they had thought they could be used to help patients with dementia and Alzheimer’s. A large religious lobby attack the use of the machine as playing God and claim that its victims have been stripped of their souls.

But when we meet Beth, she has spent many years working on a plan to get Vic back, PTSS and all. She poured over websites and saved money and the book opens with the arrival of the machine, delivered to her flat and masked as exercise equipment. With the machine and the hard drive of Vic’s memories, Beth plans to replenish Vic. But can replacing those erased memories really bring back Vic? What about all the other memories that weren’t programmed into the machine, the ones that disappeared with the others? What about the false cover stories? Unsurprisingly, once the machine has been switched on, her plans unravel and are expressed through clever use of the unreliable narrator. The humming of the machine pervades Beth’s world, vibrating through her at a pitch that shatters her life.

To say more about the plot would ruin reading the book, I think. And thought-provoking as it is, The Machine didn’t take me as far as I imagined it could perhaps because it was all too worryingly believable, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Experimenting with soldiers is nothing new, nor is our desire to use machines to alter our experience of the world.

This would be a great contender for adaptation into a film for the Channel 4 Black Mirror series because it uses technology to question what it means to be human, but I’m not sure that I would award it the Arthur C Clarke Award, though to say that with any authority I’d have to read the rest of the short-list. Perhaps I will…

Next week I’m reading The Trick Is To Keep Breathing by Janice Galloway (unless it is lost in the post in which case I’ll swap to the following week’s book), then This Book Will Save Your Life by A. M. Homes, followed by Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. As always, please feel free to make book suggestions for future weeks.

I found Father Melancholy’s Daughter a compelling but challenging read, partly because of the protagonist’s ability to get under your skin.

Father Melancholy is Margaret’s father, the Rector of St Cuthbert’s in a small town in Virginia. The novel follows Margaret’s attempts to formulate herself through an understanding of her parents that circles most intently around the period of her mother’s departure. Her father suffers from periods of depression that he calls going behind the black curtain – hence the nickname Father Melancholy – and her mother, much younger than her father, vivacious, energetic, suffers under his failure to be the perfect religious hero she had imagined.

After the death of her mother, Margaret becomes the helpmeet for her father, nourishing him through his periods of depression. Margaret allows her own needs to subjugate to her father’s and to others as well. Her need to fulfil obligations and to behave appropriately is behaviour that being a Rector’s daughter has encouraged, but it is also something that is innate within her. She lives through other people as much as she lives for herself and the book is really about her journey into selfhood, into a recognition that she needs to find her own story, her own path through life that embraces her proclivities. As a reader, I sometimes wanted to encourage her to find this path faster, to embrace some carefree youth and there are moments when it feels as if she is going to make similar mistakes to her parents. This makes the book uncomfortable to read, but for all the right reasons: Margaret feels very real.

It would be difficult not to be drawn into Margaret’s analytical and imaginative mind. There is a sense of scholarship and emotion that is unusual and enticing. In a strange way it’s like reading a female, and thankfully less arrogant, Remembrances of Time Past. Over the course of the book we watch a young woman emerge out of girlhood. Despite the potentially trite nature of such a narrative, this feels like a hard won achievement shared with the reader, especially as Gail Godwin’s descriptions of grief are so overwhelming (I found myself crying through most of the last one hundred pages, you’ll see why if you read the novel).

There is also an obsession with old monastic life, mystics and medieval texts that fits beautifully with Margaret’s life as a Rector’s daughter, but also as a contemplative being. The way in which literature and religion attempt to make sense of what it means to have an inner life combine in the narrative of Margaret’s life and almost turn writing into a religious act of faith. To search for some kind of truth about the self and about the world is a precious pursuit. Even her mother’s old artist friend, who seems to steal her mother away, understands art in very similar way.

To truly do credit to Father Melancholy’s Daughter would require more study and more pages than I care to cover here. Perhaps it is best to say that this is one of those rare novels that really forces you to undergo the protagonist’s experiences. Whilst that may not always be easy or even wished for, it makes Father Melancholy’s Daughter an extremely powerful novel that turns time upon itself in a way that reminds me of A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, only Father Melancholy’s Daughter does it more quietly and in a less dramatically self-conscious way. There is an aesthetic to Father Melancholy’s Daughter, an otherworldly quality that lends Margaret’s story the romantic glow of remembered youth. I would thoroughly recommend it.

Next week I’m reading The Machine by James Smythe, followed the week after by The Trick Is To Keep Breathing by Janice Galloway, and then This Book Will Save Your Life by A. M. Homes. Please do suggest books for future weeks.

I decided to read A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing mostly out of a sense of curiosity. I admit that I was sceptical; I was nervous of form outstripping sense and becoming a gimmick. It seemed to me that a book that decides to tackle inner-narrative in a Finnegan’s Wake make language new way, could be only one of two things: a publisher’s attempt to claim literary ground, or a truly interesting and engaging novel. I’m delighted to say that A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing is definitely the later. Suddenly stories of it taking nine years for the book to be published make sense.

This isn’t a novel for those looking for an easy read. This is a book that disjoints language and hones new turns of phrase. Our unnamed narrator tells us her story from the womb onwards, and though disjointed language is expected from a baby, I did expect a more pronounced shift towards conventionally constructed narrative as she grew older. Though the language did not shift in the way I expected, I felt better able to navigate it as the novel progressed and was delightfully struck by the novelty of phrasing this rendering of consciousness allowed. Despite the difficult subject matter, of a brother’s illness and disability, a father’s desertion, a mother’s anger and an uncle’s abuse, the narrator’s story is quite literally beautifully told. For example, when her uncle starts his harassment with awkward questions, asking if she believes in hell, her response makes clear that difficult flood of confusion and gratitude that flows from his attention: ‘Blood swirl and swirl. My thud cheeks up.’ Lovely conflations of thought, feeling and word fill the world of the book and though they create an intensity not all readers will enjoy, I couldn’t get enough of them.

This linguistic playground feels fresh but in truth, A Girl is A Half-Formed Thing is only a pioneering novel if you haven’t read William Faulkner or Virginia Woolf or Toni Morrison or Marie Darrieussecq or Elfriede Jelinek or Zeruya Shalev. But the beauty of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing is that it tries to take the representation of our inner-narrative flow even further, reworking the intense story of sexual mania, where a woman seeks to be sexually assaulted, violently abused in order to drown out a sense of her own worthlessness, in order to feel full of something even if it ends up being shame. Unsurprisingly we hear the echo of her early words: ‘Our empty spaces where fathers should be. Whenabouts we might find them and what we’d do to fill them up.’

If it weren’t for my desire to hear more of the language, I might have been frustrated with some of the plot turns. Even the narrator is aware that her own pain is common, that many others suffer in life, but the self-awareness is fleeting and though we can see that she isn’t selfish, that her desire to be dragged through the mud in name and reality to return to her cancer-struck home beaten and dishevelled is more than, but also a justified, call for her mother’s attention, her endless return to self-destruction is frustrating. In one way, this shows how involved we become in the narrator’s life; such behaviour would be frustrating from friends and relatives in real life. When the novel ends – and I won’t entirely give it away – I am disappointed. For me, there are confrontations the protagonist has yet to face and these possible confrontations might leave me less frustrated. The ending feels too easy.

However, these are the quibbles of a reader with a book that is thoroughly stimulating. How often do you reach the end of a novel and want to reread it? This is the sort of writing we should be encouraging and endorsing: brave, intelligent, unrelenting. A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing is a deserving winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2013 and hopefully will find itself on more than the Folio Prize shortlist this year.

Next week, I’ll be reading Father Melancholy’s Daughter by Gail Godwin, followed by The Machine by James Smythe, short-listed for this year’s Arthur C Clarke Award. Suggestions for following weeks would be very welcome.

I had not read any of Carson McCullers work until now and reading The Ballad of the Sad Café made me wish I had. The quiet clarity of her writing and her ability to observe such different characters has obviously influenced many of the American writers that I have read. I hear echoes of her voice in the edited Carver, in Flannery O’Connor and in Alice Munro. This is the kind of writing that makes you want to pick up your pen regardless of how good the outcome.

The greatest part of the book is taken up with the story ‘The Ballad of the Sad Café’. Behind the circus of the café with its manly cross-eyed owner and its hunchbacked resident, is the sound of the chain gang building modern American with a wistful, heartfelt chorus. There is something of this eerie resonance that plays throughout the collection. McCullers stories are not given straight-forwards resolutions, but show the complexities of human life as reality impacts upon our hopes and dreams. Our need to delude ourselves, our difficulty in mapping emotion onto reason, is revealed and responded to with breath-taking care.

Whilst I of course preferred some stories to others, The Ballad of the Sad Café is a remarkable collection whose reflective qualities made me think of Wordsworth’s definition of poetry as ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’. I’m not going to summarise the stories because I would urge you to read the book yourself.

Next week I’ll be reading A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride, then Father Melancholy’s Daughter by Gail Godwin.

The Drift is a painfully beautiful account of one man’s interrupted life. George Howarth is a physicist living in 19^th Century London, ripped into the 21^st Century by the accidental turn of one of his experiments. What follows is his quest to return to the past and then to grapple with his present.

Through a deftly crafted prose, elegant with a Victorian turn of phrase, we are immersed in George’s confusion, seeing our modern world through fresh eyes. And alongside George’s story lies H G Well’s The Time Machine. A gift from his wife, teasingly trying to encourage him to spend more time with his wife and son, George awakes in modern day London clasping the book in his hands. Once again our time sits judged, only this time against Well’s imagined future. None of these comparisons are dwelt upon, but they linger in the mind praising certain social reforms – the emancipation of women – and feeling disappointed in the absence of others – the hope that scientific discovery might herald a different social order but discovering a more confused version of what already existed. At least the haunted feeling George suffers is not physically manifested in anything like the Morlocks of Well’s imagination: humanity has not changed. Perhaps that is cause for relief and sadness.

George was an atomist, one of the first trying to prove the gaps existing within the supposed building blocks of nature. An interest in the forces of nature that separate and draw together, that exist across dimensions, positing the possibility of existing in two places at once, makes a kind of science of coincidence. George enjoys unnoticed mirroring of actions unaware, until much later in the novel, that he has unknowingly been surrounded by relatives since his arrival in the 21^st century. And even though we might be tempted to enjoy a sense of meaning in the attraction of blood to blood, that too is questioned. Perceptions of connection are more important.

Why then, has The Drift not been published?  Sadly, I think modern publishing’s leaning towards fast-paced books rather than carefully unfurled novels is the answer. The Drift has a clear and intriguing plot, but it is not revealed at the kind of pace many publishers seem to prefer. But you don’t need pace if character can carry you (think of Orlando or The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis), and George can. What will he do? How can he find purpose again? Nor do you need pace if you can appreciate precise and alarmingly elegant prose, such as: ‘Sound became careless of boundaries in the dark’ or ‘Tiredness, unexpected, brushed his bones with lead’. And this is not to say that the book lacks pace, it is just meted out at a rhythm more in keeping with George’s pre-fibre optic century.

I don’t want to track George’s journey across continents or map out the affections of his wife, so terrifyingly questioned by George in his interrogation of the past. I want someone else to pick up the book and find out for themselves. This novel has a depth and breadth of human interest that harks back to the literary work of science fiction and should be considered in its whole as a book about what it means to be human, about how we exist in the face of futility, how we forge connections in the knowledge of the spaces between us. ‘The universe was a sling, flinging its history far across itself.’ In the end it doesn’t matter who we are, but how we are for those brief moments we are conscious of our time in this particular world. And I am reminded of Borges’ story ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ where parallel worlds and times resonate upon the present like a labyrinth, evoking the endless possibility of the universe and our presence within it. How could such considerations be resisted? Someone should publish The Drift!

If any of you know, or happen to be, an agent or publisher who might be interested in reading The Drift, let me know.

Next week I’ll be reading The Ballad of the Sad Café by Carson McCullers, followed by A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride, then Father Melancholy’s Daughter by Gail Godwin. Further reading suggestions are always welcome.

MaddAddam is the final book in Margaret Atwood’s speculative fiction trilogy and though it contained some pleasing new developments – Pigoons, the pigs spliced with human DNA, talk through the Crakers and make peace with humans; humans can successfully mate with Crakers; Crakers learn to write and tell their own stories – the novel allowed me to pinpoint my disappointment in The Year of the Flood by once again mostly going back rather than further in time. My hankering was for more knowledge of what might be and how the new world might be forged, rather than for more knowledge of how the key players in the post-viral world ended up in the Craker story.

Even though Jimmy is revived, I missed his voice. He becomes nothing more than a bit part in the story – he is almost a mythic figure in MaddAddam even when alive. First Toby and then Blackbeard, a Craker boy, take on his story-telling duties, making the joint creation story of the new world. This emphasis on the stories of the Craker world is probably why the book goes backwards rather than forwards. It is as if we are reading the beginning of a new Genesis, something Crake himself would have wanted to avoid. We are given all the important details of the making of the Craker world, though the ends of Jimmy and Toby and Zeb are shrouded in Craker-speak. But I don’t want to look back, mostly because the previous two books have made it clear what sort of stories will be found in looking back. I am now so versed in the lives of those significantly entwined with Crake, from the second and third books of the trilogy, that there are few secrets remaining in the past. No, I want to look forward and the book really only hints at that – suggesting a future in which Craker-human hybrids could recreate the unenvironmental and bloody mess of our current human climate. Already Pigoons, humans and Crakers have gone against the Painballers and though they are victorious it is made clear future battles with other bad humans are likely.

But perhaps this morose outlook is my own. I had naively yearned for hope in some human-inhabited future and that which MaddAddam doles out is slender. Though God’s Gardeners would have seen that as no bad thing, I’ve yet to entirely give up on the human race. But it should be noted that whilst the introduction of the written word to the Crakers brings with the promise of mass cultural history, it also brings the likelihood of dogma; it creates a culture and it creates something to fight about. The pen may well be more powerful than the sword – something the Crakers have not yet learnt to use – but the pen may engender the sword. This is an interesting addition to the on-going need for narrative suggested in Oryx and Crake. We need story to make sense of ourselves, but written story, something seemingly unchanging, can be as destructive as it is creative.

Ironically, for a book that speaks mostly of the past, those main characters, Jimmy, Zeb and Toby, not to mention Ren and Amanda, are focussed on only for their past. What happens to them after the battle with the Painballers is mediated through Blackbeard and is therefore incomplete. After three books of getting to know these characters their ends or possible futures are suddenly denied full-bodied description. As a reader who has grown to feel a keen interest in them, this is a disappointment and makes me wonder why Margaret Atwood decided to stop at a trilogy. Why not another book? But then, the point about the human world fading into the background and being remade with the Crakers at the centre suggests perhaps no other ending, as dissatisfying as that might feel.

Ultimately, I sit back from the trilogy and feel a mixture of awe and irritation. Oryx and Crake is the most complete novel of the three. It contains all the idea kernels that unfurl in the following books and it is the most compelling read. The characters and the situations beg further telling and there is more than enough material to invest in two more books but neither lives up to the promise of Oryx and Crake. The responsibilities of forging a new world with the Crakers is never fully explored. I think I had hoped there would be more contemplation of what kind of world those left might want to nurture. Instead there is mostly apathy, or making do, but perhaps that is just realistic. Or perhaps it is in how the second and third novels are delivered: there is more telling, less showing, less room for the inner workings of the mind. Though the story is fleshed out, access into the individual experience of the characters is made more difficult. Perhaps the idea of entering into the thoughts and feelings of a Craker was a direction Margaret Atwood was unwilling to take, but at the end don’t we read for as full an access to others minds as possible? I don’t want to just pick apart the written artifacts of this new Genesis, I want experience it. Jimmy, in Oryx and Crake, allows me to experience, but as the books go on there is more and more intervention of text: the sermons of Adam One in The Year of the Flood and the diary and stories of Toby and Blackbeard in MaddAddam. I miss Jimmy because I miss the feeling that I live in that world. In Oryx and Crake I experience the new world with Jimmy. In the following two novels I am more of a witness as the characters themselves become taken up by baring witness. However inevitable that trajectory, I can’t praise The Year of the Flood or MaddAddam in the way I can Oryx and Crake.

Next week I’ll be reading The Drift by Hester Musson. Please do send in your suggestions for books to read in the coming weeks.

I really enjoyed Oryx and Crake (see previous post) and had high hopes of The Year of the Flood. Oryx and Crake leaves you on the edge of a clearing, as Jimmy stares at the first normal people he has seen since the outbreak of the manmade virus that wiped out, he thought, all of mankind but the Crakers, the super-hybrid men built by his friend Crake. But The Year of the Flood does not take Jimmy’s story much further than an afternoon and we have to wait most of the book to join him at that clearing.

Instead, The Year of the Flood follows Ren and Toby, two women involved in the religious group, The God’s Gardeners and the more violent splinter group, MaddAddam.  Interspersed between Ren and Toby’s stories are worship sessions given by Adam One, the leader of the Gardeners, that always end in hymn singing from the God’s Gardeners Oral Hymnbook. Everyday in the calendar commemorates a creature, a group of creatures or a saint. The religion is deeply environmental and encourages its followers to recite the names of extinct creatures to keep their memory alive, to avoid eating meat and to prepare for the coming of the waterless flood that will erase most of mankind (who have failed to care for God’s garden) and allow the earth to regenerate.

Most of the characters are linked to Jimmy and Crake in some way and one could see The Year of the Flood as background to their story, for despite enjoying a greater understanding of how Crake’s story unfolded, I was never as taken by either Ren or Toby as I was by Jimmy. Perhaps their preparation for disaster makes them less empathetic? Certainly their less than straightforward belief in God’s Gardeners should make them more empathic. They aren’t crazy, they are people on the run: Ren is a child dragged to the Gardeners from a compound when her mother runs away with a Gardener and is then dragged away again when her mother gets fed up with him; Toby was saved by the Gardeners when they freed her from abusive boss at SecretBurgers, a restaurant chain with a very dubious meat supply. In a way, the Gardeners provides a haven for many who have simply pissed off the corporations in some way, placing its doomsday predictions into a more scientific context – they can see the danger in the corporations attempts to outwit nature: how can you truly control DNA splicing outcomes if God couldn’t control man?

I enjoyed some of the other ideas in the book: the skin suits that sort of stick to your skin and then become breathable, allowing women to dress up in sparkly scales or bird feathers.  Painball, a place where convicts are sent in lieu of a death sentence to fight for their survival is not dissimilar to the arena of The Hunger Games. In the end though, I was reading for the connections, looking for references to Jimmy and Crake, waiting to find out how Jimmy’s story would link up to Ren’s and to Toby’s. This has by no means diminished my eagerness to read MaddAddam however. As with Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood ends on a cliff-hanger. Ren, Toby, Amanda, Jimmy and two painballers sit around a campfire waiting for the singing people, who are marching towards them, to arrive. Are they the Crakers? We assume so given that the assembled characters had to pass through their territory, but they could be another group of people. After all, The Year of the Flood has shown us how many more people survived than Jimmy imagined in Oryx and Crake. Perhaps they are the Gardeners, who we know from Adam One’s sermons, are still alive. I will look forward to finding out next week. So whilst The Year of the Flood doesn’t feel as tight or as thought provoking as Oryx and Crake, it does create a more comprehensive world, one from which the final book in the trilogy will undoubtedly benefit.

After reading MaddAddam next week, I will be moving on to an unpublished novel, The Drift, by Hester Musson. Please do send in suggestions for the following weeks.