Oops, and The Year of the Flood

OK, next time I should do my research before posting! :-( After looking more closely at the Blogger settings, I've realized that having "Followers" and having a restricted group of people "follow" your blog are two different things. That is to say, if I do restrict access, I'd have to send e-mail invitations to each reader individually - just being a Follower is not enough. And to me that seems a bit too complicated and invasive of my readers' right not to have to give out their e-mail addresses. So I think I'll just leave the blog unrestricted. Sorry about that - this was not intended as a sneaky campaign to get more Followers (though I did gain 6 - thanks, folks!)

To deal with the concerns I had in the first place, I may look at the archives and prune out some personal stuff that I feel uncomfortable about having out in public. And one of my Internet-whiz followers has kindly given me some suggestions on managing my web presence - that is, managing what the average person finds when they try to Google me.*

In other news, earlier this year I mentioned Margaret Atwood's recent novel The Year of the Flood. This summer I got a chance to read it, and I really liked it. It's the companion piece to her earlier Oryx & Crake. Both employ theological symbolism and wrestle with hard philosophical questions. I asked Gabriel McKee's opinion and he felt that O&C was the better book. From a literary standpoint I think he may be right. I enjoyed The Year of the Flood more, however, because it was (relatively speaking) more upbeat, and it focused more closely on issues in which I have a special interest. For example, much of it concerns the pros and cons of growing up in a small counter-cultural sect whose beliefs seem fanatical and ridiculous to the world around it. (Not unlike my own upbringing.) In that sense it reminded me of Anne Tyler's novel Saint Maybe. In places the two books share a sly but not unkind sense of humour in the way they view the foibles and quirks of tiny religious groups.

The concerns of Atwood's imagined sect, God's Gardeners, have to do with environmental degradation, reckless bio-engineering, the mass extinction of species and humanity's self-destructive tendencies. Their beliefs bring together a particular reading of the Bible, apocalyptic ideas, radical environmentalism, evolutionary thought and survivalism in a system that would likely seem heretical to many Christians, radical environmentalists, evolutionary biologists and survivalists! But I think their ideology shows a kind of internal logic and that Atwood is simply selecting and exaggerating some existing patterns, a bit like she did with the radically anti-feminist theocracy imagined in The Handmaid's Tale. A close reading of the Bible certainly can lead and has led people to take up radical positions on environmental protection/creation care. The original founders of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals included clergymen and evangelical activists (such as William Wilberforce) who were seen as fanatical nutcases by contemporaries. Harsh modern realities like mountaintop removal or large-scale industrial farming have led to the formation of religious groups such as Restoring Eden.**

The Year of the Flood isn't a cheerful book. It's about the collapse of society as we know it, and it looks squarely at despair, violence, oppression and, above all, human selfishness. Atwood is rarely sentimental and views human nature in a rather pessimistic light (almost Augustinian, one might say). At the same time YotF is about an endearingly flawed community of people who are trying to find a better way to live, and there are some (relatively) happy endings to be found. It casts a different light on its bleaker companion, Oryx & Crake. It's entered my canon of must-read science fiction books and it's one of the most thought-provoking portrayals of religion in sf that I've read to date. Not only that, but it's helped me make some changes in my eating habits and the way I view the natural world. So I highly recommend it and I plan on re-reading it at some point.

On a related note, another post-apocalyptic book I read this summer was Liberation by Brian Francis Slattery. It wasn't as memorable as The Year of the Flood but it was highly enjoyable. It didn't have too much to do with religion, though it did feature an entity/process called The Vibe (if I remember correctly) which was something like a cross between Providence and the Tao. The book features the adventures of six super-criminals during and after the complete economic collapse of the United States. It's about capitalism, money, the 1960s, slavery, the American Dream and American history more generally. It touches on abolitionism, which is a topic I've been reading a lot about this past year.

And that's it for today!

PS: Check out this new masterpiece about Superheroes In The Bible.


*Any Hawksley Workman fans out there? He has an amusingly bizarre ten minute "I Googled you, didya Google me? No?" schtick that he uses at concerts.
** FYI, I find that Lee over at A Thinking Reed blog frequently puts up interesting posts on the connections between traditional Christian theology/ ethics and environmental issues such as animal rights and vegetarianism.