So I would rather be an amoeba. Don’t laugh, but instead consider the essence of amoeba-ness. They’re transparent, & thus hard to find. They change shape by sending out pseudopodia (e.g. conversations, letters like this one & poems etc.) and encounter the universe by flowing around it; when in hostile environment they encyst by forming a hard shell, & hibernate till coming out again is worthwhile.

—Margaret Atwood to Al Purdy, October 4, 1964

Ambition doesn’t come naturally to the amoeba, so it’s safe to say that Margaret Atwood’s personal goals have evolved somewhat in the forty-five years since she wrote that letter: one can’t describe the scope of her current project, a trilogy of books set in a post-apocalyptic future, without mentioning capital-A ambition. The just-released second novel, The Year of the Flood, takes place in a richly imagined, unnervingly futuristic version of our society. It encompasses twenty years; three narrators, each working in a distinct mode; three alternating tenses; and fourteen songs belonging to the oral hymn book of the God’s Gardeners, the vaguely mythical eco-cult at the centre of the story.

But perhaps it’s a mistake to dismiss the lowly amoeba so quickly. After all, in Atwood’s science-obsessed world every gene counts. And despite the obvious Atwoodian quality of much of the novel’s setting and concern—it takes place at the same time and place as its predecessor, Oryx and Crake, so the horrific menagerie of human-pig hybrids, rakunks, liobams, and Mo’Hair sheep returns—the author’s presence, stylistically, at least, is quite “transparent, & thus hard to find.” As is customary in her dystopian novels, Atwood expands her world through the lucid description of its deep strangeness rather than with overwrought prose designed to draw more attention to the hand holding the pen that to what emerges from it.

Yet simple sentences don’t necessarily depict things imagined simply. Thus we find ourselves within the Sticky Zone at Scales and Tails, a high-end strip club owned by SeksMart, where dancers don biofilm bodysuits that grow feathers. We find ourselves in the AnooYoo Spa (“We’re not selling only beauty...We’re selling hope”), where the wealthy wives of HelthWyzer and Rejoove Corp executives flock for treatments such as the Intestinal Whisk. We find ourselves in a climate where one daren’t go outside without the protection of not only SuperD, but SolarNix, too. Atwood is so successful at creating this futuristic world that it nearly defeats itself. Her relentless system of genetic atrocities and corporate sponsorship becomes a clever, shiny simulacrum of the future rather than a credible sci-fi version of it. It’s hard to imagine anyone real living there; the plastic sheen’s so perfect that all texture disappears.

Fortunately we have Toby and Ren, the twin chambers of the novel’s beating heart, two women who are so fully imagined and wonderfully distinct that the didactic excess of the world in which they struggle is forgotten. Like the young Atwood’s amoeba, Toby and Ren survivethe plague thanks to the hard shells of shelter; much of the novel follows them in their separate hibernations, documenting their present-day trials while drifting back into their respective pasts, both within the confines of the God’s Gardeners and in the broader world. The novel’s greatest strength is the quiet picture it offers of their fraught but tender relationship, especially after their paths intertwine. At one point, Ren thinks of the idea of romantic pain, sarcastically wondering “what Toby knows about that?” Two pages later, Toby wishes she were accompanied by “someone less fragile...A little tougher.” Each woman underestimates the other, and only we as readers, aware of the histories they keep shrouded, can see the full implications of their misunderstanding. Their shared incomprehension becomes a moving reminder of the beautiful, true, and imperfect ways in which we come to know one another as human beings.

Near the book’s end, both women come out of their hibernation, emerging into a very different version of their very different world. And, strangely enough, it is amid the bleakness of that destroyed landscape that one feels a kind of lightness. Though the wasted city is indeed terrifying, a sense of play and possibility rises above the lessons we’re meant to learn. (It is here, finally, that we meet the touchingly naive immortals, full of song and bearing enormous blue penises.) Despite the novel’s assertion that “you can’t live with [the knowledge that the earth is almost gone] and keep on whistling,” that’s precisely what its creator is doing. She continues whistling her wicked tunes—new poems, essays, Massey Lectures, and post-apocalyptic
roller coasters like this one—and as we read her, it is very clear that no one has more fun being deadly serious than Margaret Atwood. Ultimately, that’s essential to her novelistic work, and to her persona as our leading public intellectual; it’s a large part of what makes her so beloved. It’s easier to appreciate a star that bright when it’s cloaked in a smirk-shaped cloud.

A talent, in other words, not unlike a highly evolved version of the amoeba that she told her friend Al Purdy she wanted to be—a deceptively simple, shape-shifting entity sending feelers into the world, flowing about the universe, coming out when it’s worthwhile. Purdy answered Atwood’s letter, of course. But he also responded in verse almost twenty-five years later, in a poem called “Concerning Ms. Atwood.” He imagined his friend Peggy in this same vein, and anticipated the books she would come to write—our fine, wise jester not just visiting the future, but taking names:

There is Margaret Atwood
—sitting in an unmanned spaceship
waiting for blast-off her lovely
eyes slightly dilated from a sleeping
drug administered by flight surgeons
She wakes at the edge of the universe
where someone says “Hello
Pleased to meet you Ms. Atwood
My name is God” She smiles
and writes the name down promptly
in her little notebook to prevent
forgetfulness