Narrated by Bernadette Dunne, Marc Bramhall, and Katie MacNichol.Audiobook published by Books on Tape, Inc. 2009.
Formats available: print, ebook, MP3 audiobook, CD audiobook.
Story:
Reading:
I'm stunned by Margaret Atwood's ability to produce one great novel after another. This is an intreaguing story, well-told. It's classic Margaret Atwood: who survives in a post-apocalyptic future and how? The story takes a look at the world she created in Oryx and Crake from another point of view, that of the members of the fringe religious and environmentalist group called God's Gardeners. Toby, Ren, and Adam One tell of the events that led up to what The Gardeners call the "waterless flood," a plague that has wiped out the majority of human life on Earth.
Toby joined The Gardeners to escape a homicidal stalker. While she doesn't embrace all of their religious tenets, she does embrace their preparations for the waterless flood. She learns survival skills, the medicinal uses of plants, gardening, and hunting, all of which serve her well in the aftermath of the plague.
Ren came to The Gardeners as a child when her mother left her father to run off with Zeb, a Gardener. When her mother returns to her father in the HelthWyzer Compound, Ren feels unmoored and eventually ends up as a sex worker at a high-end brothel. She survives the flood because she is locked in a decontamination zone when the plague hits.
Adam One joins the story in the form of his sermons to his Gardener community by which we come to understand The Gardener's theology.
Three narrators bring the voices of Toby, Ren, and Adam One to life. The multi-voiced performance worked very well for this book. What didn't work as well for me is the fact that the novel skips around quite a bit in time. This works better in print where you can revisit chapters if you lose a sense of the order of events. Because this audiobooks takes 14 hours to listen to, it was difficult to keep straight the events of the story as we jumped forward and backward in time over the two weeks it took me to listen to it. The Gardener hymns written for the book are an interesting idea but seemed a drag on the pace of the reading. I found myself skipping over them to get back to the story, especially at the end when the story becomes highly suspenseful.
Overall I thought this was an excellent story and very well presented by the narrators. Highly recommended to Atwood enthusiasts.
