Review: The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

The Year of the Flood
by Margaret Atwood (2009)

McClelland & Stewart, Ontario

A natural disaster alters Earth obliterating most human life. Within the survivors: Ren, a trapeze dancer and Toby, a God’s Gardener (a religious/vegan group).
Others survivors: Adam One, leader of the God’s Gardener; Amanda, Ren’s friend; Zeb, eco-fighter and Ren’s stepfather; CorpSeCorps, the policing force in this new world.
Another ‘character’: “the asphalt-eating microbe” (they were melting highways).

In this post-apocalyptic future they search the perfect human being and the immortality, somebody with human clonation and others following the command of the natural world (after God Is Dead, Atwood says “God Is Green”).

Atwood is spying through an ajar door leading to the future. Usually the science fiction describes a very far future: Orwell with 1984 (wrote in 1949), Kubrick with 2001: A Space Odyssey (shot in 1968), but in this book we read the future of the next door.

I read and ate The Year of the Flood as a dressed salad: the lettuce as the God's Gardeners, the oil as Toby and Ren, the salt as the CorpeSeCorps, and the bread crisps as the Oral Hymns. Eat the salad on a rooftop, please.
A question: Why Blanco doesn't think Toby’s poisoning him?

Some quotes:
"Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, "I'll be dead," you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence. And that's how people got the idea of the immortality of the soul - it was a consequence of grammar." p. 316

"Why so soon? It's the cry of a child being called home at dusk, it's the universal protest against time." p. 326

"What is our Cosmos but a snowflake?" p. 424