Margaret Atwood – Year of the Flood
Booker Prize Winning Author Reads (and Dances) at UCLA
Oct 10, 2009
Margaret Atwood has been looking into the future for the last 30 years. She has written more than 35 volumes of poetry, fiction and nonfiction, including the best-selling novel The Blind Assassin.
In The Handmaid's Tale (1983) she predicted an outbreak of infertility in the U.S., a country overtaken by fundamentalists. In Oryx and Crake (2003) Atwood chronicled a bioengineered world where a new species had been invented with the express purpose of remaking the world.
Atwood at UCLA
On Friday night, Atwood stepped onstage in Royce Hall at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in Westwood. Clad in baggy black trousers and a black jacket with panels of shocking colour she resembled a court jester – one who is able to imagine where the human race is headed. Framing her wry grin was her infamous blossom of white cotton candy hair.
She was there for the book launch of her latest novel Year of the Flood, billed as a 70-minute dramatic reading with music and a fundraising event for the environment. She read excerpts from the book in which she chronicles a near-universal plague that has destroyed almost all of humanity but spared all other creatures. It is set in the near future and there are two female survivors, Toby and Ren.
Dramatizing Year of the Flood
Atwood introduced it as a hybrid evening with several L.A. actors and a small chorus who dramatized selected scenes. Katie MacNichol played Ren (and is Ren on the audiobook version) and Celeste Ciulla was the voice of Toby (and incidentally a dead ringer for actress Margot Kidder). The readings were wonderful but the singing was trippy and, at times, jarring.
The excerpts that were read presented the survivors' stories past and present and illustrated the hideous world they live in. In fear of the plague, in fear of the cruel ruling CorpSEcorps, in fear of starving, in fear of loneliness, in fear of remembering the past. The chapters bounce back before and after the 'Waterless Flood', environmental damage, and great hatred between the rich and poor, the weak and strong.
Saint David Suzuki
It's a world where Al Gore, David Suzuki, and actor Ed Begley Jr. are saints worshipped for their environmentalism by the gentle Gardeners, an idealistic but cultish group that lives apart from society, grows its own plant food and tries to blend science with the Bible and the environment.
And at the end of the evening, as the chorus sang about the beauty of vegetarianism, Atwood stood, clapped off key and even danced a bit. She seemed thrilled to be there almost as much as the audience was to see her.
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