At the fundraising dinners before each performance, the food is local, organic, and awash in granola-y goodness. In Ottawa, the organizers created a fantasy menu from the book—Adam Thirteen’s Warm Lentil Salad, Ren’s Brown Butter Smashed Potatoes and Roasted Root Vegetables. (“They wanted a lot of mushrooms,” says Bridgette McLean, the caterer. “It was a challenge. I usually do weddings.”) The next night in Kingston, there are “Secret Burgers”—unlike the novel, certified human-free—and AnooYoo Spa Lemon Meringue Facial Cream tarts (after the apocalypse you can’t afford to be choosy).
It’s all tongue-in-cheek, but Atwood is serious about the underlying message. “I grew up amongst the biologists,” she says. “My dad [an entomologist] was among the first to say don’t spray forests, it’s counterproductive, insects can evolve faster than we can poison them.” The Gardeners aren’t necessarily the heroes of The Year of the Flood, but they are the best prepared for the wrenching future. It is environmentalism as fully fledged religion, with all of the good and bad that entails. “All of these things are made up of human beings. Show me a perfect human being,” says Atwood. The real world’s great faiths all share roots in nature, she says, and are slowly moving back toward them. (She cites The Green Bible, a new edition of the Good Book, printed with soya ink on recycled paper, with God’s words about nature printed in green, and an appendix filled with tips on how to be at one with the earth, as one example.) The Gardeners have their saints and martyrs—St. Dian Fossey, St. Al Gore, St. David Suzuki, St. Farley of the Wolves. As to where Atwood’s own opinion lies, she is positively Delphic. Selfish creatures that we are, we need to believe that there is some sort of “inner virtue” in saving our own souls, or the planet. “We need an emotional connection—to believe that there is something worth saving,” says Atwood. “That’s why they use baby seals and panda bears, rather than baby snakes and beetles, in environmental campaigns.”
After so many books, she has learned that it is useless to try to point the reader in one direction or the other—they will take away exactly what they want to. “You’re not in control of how people read a book. They’re doing their own interpretation,” she says. The same que sera, sera attitude is extended to The Year of the Flood tour. The script gets sent ahead, and Atwood arrives onstage, as much in the dark as the audience as to how it will all turn out. The choir in Ottawa, the Calixa Lavallée Ensemble, were precise and professional music school students. The next night in Kingston had a far looser vibe, with the accompanying guitar, accordion and stand-up bass placing the hymns somewhere between Jacques Brel and Lawrence Welk. In Edinburgh, a former bishop played Adam One, dressed in a leopard skin. In Bristol, the roles of the three narrators were played by two local booksellers and a customer who wandered into the shop and volunteered to give it a go. Manchester featured the local Lesbian and Gay Chorus. Toronto had Micah Barnes, formerly of the a cappella group the Nylons, singing along with Taylor Lezzaza, a woman who waits tables at Atwood’s local espresso bar. “Most of the singers have been better singers than the Gardeners,” says the author. Onstage, as she claps along in herky-jerky time with the music, grinning wide, her delight is evident.
Is this the future of the book tour? Another case of Atwood surfing the zeitgeist—releasing Payback, a book about debt during the height of last fall’s financial meltdown, turning her hand to environmental themes in Oryx and Crake just as the green movement gathered steam? “I do not predict the future,” she says. “I just have a creepy way of appearing to.”
With three narrative voices, The Year of the Flood lends itself to a theatrical reading, says Atwood. But she’s unsure if she will go this way again. The blog is fun, but work, not something she’ll keep up when she’s home, her days filled with writing and trashy TV.
During the walk-through before the performance in Kingston, the director, Jim Garrard, a founder of Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille and president of Rochdale College, the U of T’s infamous hippy enclave, looks around at all the hoopla and makes a dry observation. “It’s kind of like a Rolling Stones tour,” he says. Atwood shakes her head and smiles. “To me, it’s been a bit like falling down the stairs,” she says. M
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