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Abstract
ABSTRACT Margaret Atwood’s speculative cli-fi novel The Year of the Flood (2014) addresses the complexities of climate destruction in tracing one community’s journey through an eco-apocalypse. Writing disaster not as an end, but as a beginning, Atwood’s novel shows the power of ecological hope to spark a revitalized future despite destruction. Drawing from Rebecca Solnit’s Paradise Built in Hell (2009) and Celia Deane-Drummond’s A Primer in Eco-theology (2017) as methodological frameworks, I suggest that Atwood’s model of religious community, a small group of social exiles known as God’s Gardeners, serves as a potent counterpoint to fatal climate narratives by advocating for both environmental and spiritual restoration. Though the novel satirizes the Gardeners through their ecologically radical religious beliefs, the group nonetheless offers intriguing starting points for how we can rethink community and belief in view of the Anthropocene’s shifting landscapes. Specifically, the influence of eco-theology on the novel’s narrator-protagonist, Toby, sketches Solnit and Deane-Drummond’s visions of hope by revealing the power one individual holds in shaping their environment and community. Refusing to allow climate disaster to eclipse the potential for an ecologically fertile future, The Year of the Flood reads the apocalypse as an epicentre for action, and as a vehicle to shape a more sustainable and spiritually attuned society.
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