Books: A world of advanced social decay

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dry killer tide of disease (like an H1N1 ous impoverished ghettos bump up against on steroids) wipes out most of humani- privileged gated communities whose memty. The imaginative prowess and literary bers are numbed by mindless consumerskill of Canada’s most celebrated fiction ism. And running amok, through town and writer set the stage for the unspecified country, is a bizarre assortment of bio-enplague by presenting a dystopia just one gineered animal species, not all of which It is a world of advanced social disinte- ed world order with unabashed venalgration and environmental ruin. Murder- ity and total impunity. Their enforcement Socialism 2010: Socialism or Barbarism / Location: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, U of Toronto, 252 Bloor Street West. Co-sponsored by: Socialist Action / Ligue pour l’Action socialiste – Canadian state, Thursday, May 20: 7 p.m. Palestine, Afghanistan and Haiti: Occupation and 1 p.m. Combatting the Corporate Agenda – Jobs, Pensions and Poverty 2 p.m. Closed session for SA members and invited guests. SA/LAS Convention.

Tickets: $20 in advance for weekend; $30 at door for wkend; $5 per session (or For more information: www.socialistaction-canada.blogspot.com (416) 535-8779, H might stimulate your dissidence. ere is a reading for early spring that Unsurprisingly, the fiasco of the climatechange summit in Copenhagen led me to Margaret Atwood’s latest eco-disaster novel, “Year of the Flood” (Mc- ism in decay. Clelland and Stewart, Toronto, 2009, 431 pages). Not a watery deluge, but a Eco-socialism or Extinction An International Educational Conference, May 20-23 Socialist Action – USA, and the Socialist Unity League (LUS) – Mexico Resistance Friday, May 21:

4 p.m. Dialectical Materialism – a philosophy for radical change 7 p.m. From Copenhagen to Mexico City – the World at the Brink Saturday, May 22:

10 a.m. Marx versus Malthus 4 p.m. Women’s Liberation Today 7 p.m. World Economic Disorder and the G8/G20 Summits Sunday, May 23:

11 a.m. Civil rights under attack – Fight back!

PWYC)

[email protected] remove from present-day late-capital- are benign. Giant corporations govern the fragmentarm is aptly called CorpSEcorps, a lethal private security army and fitting successor to Blackwater-Xe and company.

“Year of the Flood” could be considered a sequel to Atwood’s highly acclaimed “Oryx and Crake”, except that it is a parallel tale that arrives at a common point—a handful of surviving ordinary people encounter a bizarre group of ‘blue’ mutant humans with a hyper-active libido.

The author has confected a tale that is half-prediction, half satire—like a blend of George Orwell and Jonathan Swift. So, through the eyes of the finely drawn protagonists Ren and Toby, a sex-club dancer and a waitress respectively, we learn of the suspect serums of HelthWyzer (rhymes with Pfizer), the immortality vending CryoJeenyus, the soma-like HappyCuppa, the indulgent AnooYoo spas, and the notorious Painballers (inmates of a Survivor-reality prison camp). A malicious Painballer is hunting Toby, who earlier escaped his control when she fled the Sticky Zone where she was a hapMargaret Atwood.

less server of Secretburgers.

The disappointing aspect is that the foremost resistance to the pervasive repression and moral decay is a hippie vegetarian cult, God’s Gardeners, who absurdly, self-righteously try to blend religion and science. Is this the author’s conscious snub of the working-class movement and the materialist left, or is she prodding us to see what will be if the socialist movement doesn’t soon gain more traction?

While “Year of the Flood” is very derivative of “Oryx and Crake”, though more overtly feminist in its portrayal of personal relationships and gender oppression, that really constitutes an argument for reading both novels. Given Atwood’s pungent satire of present trends, her latest writings, redolent with anti-capitalist implications, may leave you wondering why she is not a Marxist firebrand. n Socialist Action march 2010 9