Margaret Atwood, Year of the Flood

 I have at last gotten around to the sequel to Margaret Atwood's breathtaking Oryx and Crake.  The Year of the Flood is not a temporal sequel.  It does not continue the plot where the first novel left off.  Instead, it runs through the same events, from a different perspective.  Oryx and Crake centers on the masterminds at the center of a massive, intentionally engineered bio-disaster.  The Year of the Flood, instead, narrates the events from the perspectives of a handful of minor characters mentioned at the fringes of O&C.  The main characters are members of God's Gardeners, an eco-vegetarian-religious cult led by the prophetic Adam One and his ancillary Adams and Eves.  Their theology is dopey, conveyed in clumsy rhymes and songs for their youngest members, and yet, as the world falls apart around them, they seem increasingly to be the only people both fit enough to survive in the new world they inherit, and descent enough to deserve it.

Atwood's characteristic creativity is here, but since I had already heard many of the most delightful inventions in O&C, I was less stunned by them as they unfolded.  Similarly, the plot is largely a given.  Individual lives are up for grabs, of course, but the larger, world-changing narrative is not.  As a writing exercise, it is a fascinating idea to write a complete novel twice, from two different points of view (and, according to the cover of my copy, there will be a third in the "MaddAddam Trilogy").  As a reader, though, I think I might have preferred to have the two interlaced together as one hefty novel, switching back and forth between perspectives.  I wonder -- could they be read that way, against Atwood's planning, one chapter of each in sequence, all the way through?