Too much Religion, Not enough Science

I have a love-hate relationship with Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood and the themes it revolves around.  Mostly because there’s too much religion and not enough science.  At its’ foundation, the novel revolves around a religious group known as the Gardeners who anticipate the coming of a waterless-flood that will wipe out mankind therefore healing any damage done to Earth. Atwood also incorporates the notion that large corporations control everything especially in terms of the Earth’s economy and because of this, those corporations have depleted most of the resources and animals on the planet’s surface.

The idea of large corporations controlling everything is something I am able to relate to and is one of the reasons I enjoyed this book. I enjoyed it because I find a lot of truth about our own society throughout Atwood’s work and writing. In today’s society, across the globe, thousands of large corporations rule over every aspect of not only the economy but society and therefore consume almost every resource or animal known to man. These corporations also have the power to dictate what sells and how much it sells for. Take the oil industry for example. Oil companies have been selling one of society’s most precious resources at astronomical prices. This in turn hurts society as a whole the majority of the time.

The one aspect that turned me off from the novel in some ways is how Atwood decided to revolve most of the story around the Gardeners. In this sense I felt as if she brought religious aspects into it too much and in a sense I felt that that took away the story and how she hoped it related to everyday life. All in all, I think the novel was good for the most part because it was easily relatable to today’s society and I always love making comparisons like that.

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