Among the other people living with God’s Gardeners is a girl named Ren, who has been brought there by her mother. Ren will later be taken back to the HelthWyzer compound, where she falls in love with Jimmy — the hero of Oryx and Crake, also known as Snowman — who will break her heart by taking up with her best friend, Amanda.
After her biofather is kidnapped, Ren winds up working as a trapeze dancer at a sex club named Scales and Tails — one of her teachers actually recommends it as a good job with health benefits and a dental plan — and it is there, in an isolation room, that Ren will wait out the Waterless Flood.
Although some of the chapters in this book start with annoying passages detailing the Gardeners’ ecological credo, Atwood largely refrains from the sort of proselytizing that tarnished her earlier ventures into science fiction. By focusing on her characters and their perilous journeys through a nightmare world, she has succeeded in writing a gripping and visceral book that showcases the pure storytelling talents she displayed with such verve in her 2000 novel, The Blind Assassin.
RSS