A solid feminist dystopian read, and who doesn’t love one of those. The human race has trashed the planet, messed irrevocably with animal genes, and is now being wiped out by an unnamed plague. Violent anarchy reigns, fuelled by malign corporate forces, in the midst of which God’s Gardeners, a small eco-sect, try to survive living by the gospel of peaceful co-existence with nature. Although the good guys and the bad guys are clearly delineated, there are plenty of moral grey areas and murky sexual politics for the women narrators and reader to navigate. Margaret Atwood does Big Stuff head-on without being didactic or impersonal, her great strength, and this is full of Big Stuff and thoroughly satisfying.
