This is the sort of book Sarah Palin would blithely endorse – as a manual. Much has been said of Margaret Atwood‘s talent in depicting future dystopias, but this one is the best at casually putting across the message. And what a message it is. Religious fundamentalists have slaughtered the Congress in the good ol’ US of A, and instituted an androcracy the likes of which have not been seen since Biblical times. Not only are men firmly in charge, but they have reduced women to rigidly biological roles, with their viviparousness made paramount and venerated above all. The tale is told from the point of view of an escapee, one who flees her handmaidenly hell and makes it to Canada and thence to England.

The parallels between Atwood’s nightmare and our world are quite recognizable, with the chilling realization that more and more of the similarities are being realized with every passing day. Consider the matter of the patronymic replacing the entire name, one of many indignities suffered by women of the book’s era. The inherent hypocrisies of theocracies are revealed by Atwood’s denouement, made all the more chilling by the casual nature of their pronouncement. Read this book and shiver for a world that might yet come one day.

ISBN: 0-7704-2820-7

This is definitely one of Atwood‘s more worldly works. A Canadian freelance journalist goes South to the tropics, hoping to find a good source for her travel articles. After all, there’s no better muse than the real thing. But of course, our polite Canadian rapidly gets embroiled in circumstances far beyond her control. The banana republic is living up to its name, being mired in a systematic morass of corruption and on the verge of a civil war. Our journalist hooks up with an American and enjoys his companionship, forgetting the web of intrigue that surrounds all foreigners on small isles where everyone knows everyone else’s business. The American is suspected of being a CIA agent, as most wealthy Americans in tiny Caribbean republics are wont to be. A wealthy man who can disappear for days on end in his private boat would be the perfect cover for a spook.

But our ever-so-polite Canadian journalista is not a spy or a spook or an assassin or a fomentor of dissent. She is simply there to soak up the sun, revel in a few carnal delights, find neat things to write about in her travel column and go home. Atwood cleverly portrays our protagonist as a naive girl from a naive country, caught up in the machinations of the big powers and swept up in the rising tide of revolution. When our heroine gets jailed after an outburst of violence, she realizes her true plight and wishes she was back home. This is a weird book, oddly disconnected while remaining just interesting enough to keep reading. You feel sympathy for the journalist, being a fellow countryman, but at the same time can’t help but think she’s an awful ninny for persisting in a place where a civil war is about to break out. Deciding to stay on because she’s happy for the first time in a long time might have been forgivable, but surely no one can be so blind as to not see the peril they’re in. Anyway, I don’t wish to belabour the point. This is a good book and perhaps you won’t find it as odd as I did. A good read and Atwood’s prose is as rock-solid as ever.

ISBN: 0-7710-0837-6

This compendium is full of surprises. Most of the stories are staid and respectable, almost as though Canada were speaking to the world through her literary offspring. Sinclair Ross‘ The Lamp At Noon is great at capturing the hopelessness of failure on a farmer’s stead. As the soil erodes, do the man’s hopes and his family’s fortune along with it. One-Two-Three Little Indians is a heart-wrenching tale about a man on a reserve who watches his baby die because the walk to the nearest doctor’s is too far and none of the picnicking folk think him serious enough to let him hitch a ride. That final burst on the freeway, when Big Tom runs towards the doctor’s with everything he’s got to save his burning child, leaves you desperately hoping that he makes it, despite the sinking stone in your gut that he’s never going to make it. God is Not a Fish Inspector describes the inevitable decline a man must bitterly face in the autumn of his years, perfectly manifested in Fusi Bergman’s obstinate desire to be king of his soon-to-be-inherited castle.

Barbara Gowdy‘s We So Seldom Look on Love is a view of love that is seldom seen indeed. Told from the point of view of a female necrophiliac (which is extremely rare), the story is mesmerizing to the last drop. Working in a mortuary and privy to the other workers’ necrophiliac tendencies, the protagonist sees nothing wrong with them, instead convincing herself that she’s finally found a job in the one profession that won’t look askance at her particular paraphilia.The book ends with Digging Up the Mountains and Chmarnyk, two radically different stories. The former is about a man escaping from a tin-pot republic where the tide has turned against wealthy entrepreneurs like himself. Exile from the homeland to a more welcoming country, Canada in this case, is really the only viable option. Chmarnyk, the mythical rain-man, is about Eastern Europeans who cross the border into Manitoba, but are reviled by the original inhabitants, who treat them as gypsies were and still are treated in many parts of the world. On that promising note, the book draws to a close, leaving us with a sizable nugget of Canadiana, with us the richer for having read it.

Conclusion: a good read for a wintry day, when the attention span is lower and needs constant revival in the form of short stories.

ISBN: 0-19-541025-4

A successful addition to the Oryx-and-Crake mythos is The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood, perhaps the only person who embodies Canadiana more successfully than Neil Young. We are treated to the travails of two women in the post-apocalyptic world we first saw in Oryx and Crake. The great flood has washed everything away, specifically, most of mankind in its virulent diluvianism. Ren and Toby are left, adherents of Adam One’s religion, an olio of motley neo-pagan, hippie and assorted post-modern beliefs sewn together in a patchwork quilt of beliefs and odd sonnets. They have survived almost by chance, but now must outlast hunger, disease and other, more corporeal enemies out to get them.

Atwood creates strong characters that leap out from the page and don’t fade back into twenty-six patterns on crushed trees easily. The characters have the smell of death about them, with their cynicism so strong as to emit an aura of despair reaching out from the cold grave. But they are indomitable at the same time and don’t give in easily. Rape, torture, pain, poverty, starvation, mutilation, despair, envy and loneliness are all overcome as they fight against the cold universe and all it throws at them. There are no easy answers in this book, just narratives of what the world might evolve into, given its current course. The whole post-apocalyptic theme has been done to death, but to Atwood’s credit, this book is eminently readable and you end up wanting more of the same. You laugh at the soon-to-be-dated descriptions of camera phones, but the timelessly eternal trait of human longing will never be outdated. Vita brevis, sub specie aeternitatis.

ISBN: 978-0-7710-0844-3