Two Apocalyptic Scenarios: Atwood's Flood, McCarthy's Road

I have always been an idealistic—unrealistic?—pacifist. When I moved alone to Austin at age 22, with my freshly-earned liberal arts degree and a vague notion of going to law school, my father offered to buy me a gun. Looking back, and having my own children now, I can see why he worried about his little girl in the big city. But at the time I thought he’d gone bonkers. I contemplated joining the Quakers for a couple of years, and one of my most treasured and admired friends was a brilliant man I met at the Quaker meeting who had been a conscientious objector during World War II. It’s not that I denied that evil existed, but I figured that if it was my time to go, so be it, but I wasn’t going to participate in violence. Give peace a chance, turn the other cheek, and all that jazz.

But over the last month, two books have made me think that having a gun on hand might not be a bad idea. I wouldn’t use it. I’d bury it. Just in case the apocalypse were to come and by some miracle, well, actually the complete opposite of a miracle, I were to survive.

One of these books is Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood. It is by far one of the stranger books I've read, but I keep thinking about it, which tells me it was pretty good. For the first several chapters, before I completely figured out what was going on, I kept thinking my stumbling block to getting into it was my aversion to futuristic dystopian apocalyptic scenarios. But when I'm honest with myself, I have to admit that I actually enjoy futuristic dystopian apocalyptic scenarios. Some of the most fascinating and influential books I've read include 1984, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, and even The Handmaid's Tale, the only book by Atwood I'd read until this one.

The Year of the Flood takes place sometime in the future, but not terribly far in the future—maybe sometime in the 2020s (there are still laptops and cellphones, and they function pretty much like the ones we have today)—and is structured around the alternating narrations of two women, Toby and Ren, interspersed with "hymns" of the Gardeners, a religious cult that teaches reverence for the earth as well as practical skills in gardening and foraging. The Gardeners’ religion has been formed in reaction to mainstream society's increasing reliance on genetically engineered food and superficial soul-eroding pursuits, which are slowly killing the environment. Toby is a woman who had some tough breaks before being rescued by the Gardeners and eventually becoming one of the cult leaders. The other narrator, Ren, grows up with the Gardeners, but ends up as a prostitute in a high-dollar dance club. Both women survive the "waterless flood," a pandemic that eradicates a huge number of the human race.

I became enveloped in this world, eventually deciding that the scenario is scarily possible. The names of places and corporations give the story an exaggerated feel, and it would almost be comical if it didn't read as prophecy.

But now that I’ve read The Road by Cormac McCarthy, another dystopian novel, The Year of the Flood almost does seem like a comedy .

In The Road, a man and his young son—I imagine the son to be about nine—travel in a devastated, burnt world, pushing all of their belongings in a grocery cart, trying to survive where there are few people and no vegetation. The people they do encounter are likely to be rapists and cannibals, so must be avoided. The only thing that propels them forward is the love they have for each other. The man tells his son that they are the ones who carry “the fire,” which the reader comes to understand as this powerful love. The story is told in McCarthy’s stupefyingly powerful prose. I came to admire McCarthy after reading All the Pretty Horses, but The Road is different. The Road stands alone. I had the same feeling when I finished it as when I finished reading The Sound and The Fury: This is IT. This is what literature is about.

I finished The Road while sitting on the porch swing at the front of our house. It was a perfect cloudless Saturday in April: azaleas were blooming, birds were chirping, the lawn had just greened up from the winter. Looking up from this novel, which was most definitely the darkest novel I’d ever read—and by that I don’t just mean the darkness of human nature that it revealed, because it also revealed an incredible lightness, and even a glimmer of hope, but I mean the world of the novel was literally dark: there was no color in it, everything was burned, their clothes and their bodies were filthy, the sun was forever hidden by the gray—suddenly the world around me was more colorful than I’d ever noticed it to be. In contrast to the world of The Road, my life was a fluorescent Technicolor wonderland. I felt more alive at that moment than I had in a long time.

Back to the guns. In both novels, the protagonists were able to produce guns, which kept them alive after the apocalypse. In The Year of the Flood, Toby has a rifle that was once her father’s and was buried in their former suburban back yard. The man in The Road has a gun too, and it is absolutely essential to his and his son’s survival. Honestly, I’m really not sure I’d want to be alive at that point (and the gun could be used to take care of that; in fact, the mother of the boy in The Road had taken that route). But if the will to survive were to trump the desire to die at that point, these novels both indicate that a gun could be essential, mainly for protection. Maybe I need to take my dad up on his offer after all.

But it seems trite to end a discussion of these two books on this note. They can't be boiled down to my desire to purchase a gun. Both of them kept my attention; I had a hard time putting either down, and I have thought about both long after finishing. Atwood's novel was fantastical and enjoyable, if scary. It comes across as a political message, but it was also good reading, and truthfully, it's a prophecy that I wish more people would read and heed. McCarthy's was a book that I will remember and reread and recommend. It may be prophecy, but more than that, it's poetry.