The human face of these events comes from two female protagonists, whose perspectives we share as the action jumps back and forth between the years leading up to the Waterless Flood and its immediate aftermath: Toby, an ‘Eve’ of God’s Gardeners, who is secretly sceptical of their beliefs but prized by them for her skills as a herbalist; and Ren, a young Gardener who leaves to become a ‘trapeze dancer’ in a high-end sex club called Scales and Tails.

The Year of the Flood presents a polarised and unremittingly bleak view of people. On the one hand, the population at large doesn’t care about the moribund planet and seems happy to gene-splice to its heart’s content until there are no naturally occurring species left. On the other, humanity’s only viable response to the catastrophe it has presided over is a well-meaning but conflicted band of cult members, who can’t laugh at farts because digestion is holy, who frown upon toys because ‘Nature is our playground’, and whose idea of a solution is to try and mind-meld with a pod of peas.

Atwood’s vision is compelling and powerfully imagined, if undermined at times by the conflict between her urge to make knowing (and often funny) gags about the real world and her wish to render a plausibly hellish future. But then, this is a novel much preoccupied with the necessary combination of the apparently irreconcilable.

Heliopolis, by James Scudamore, is published in paperback by Harvill Secker at £12.99.

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