Postal 2: Apocalypse Weekend

The title is the single best part of the book. The narrator-heroine. Cedar Hawk Songmaker, is driving north (right at the edge of an apocalypse), and she sees those words on a billboard in an empty Minnesota field. That the phrase is so ambiguous is its beauty. That it resonates to the novel's epigraph supports the evolutionary changes the text recounts: if "the Word is living. being, spirit, all verdant greening, all creativity.. . land] manifests itself in every creature (Hildegard of Bingen). This protagonist is an expectant mother--four months along--who is just getting the opportunity to meet her Ojibwe birth parents. She writes her "account" (4) as a testament of the times and a confession to her unborn child. She notes that "since last week things have changed. Apparently-I mean, nobody knows--our world is running backward. Or forward. Or maybe sideways, in a way as yet ungrasped" (3). The problem with the change, which the narrator actually accepts, is society's response to it. "Whatever is actually occurring, there is constant breaking news about how it will be handled--speculation, really concerning what comes next--..," (4). However, readers of apocalyptic fiction know what comes next. Of course, it's control. Control of women and human conception and evolution. Of course it is. Does the book remind one of The Handmaid's Tale'l Yes. Of the MaddAdam trilogy? Yes. I have written elsewhere that it is hard--if not impossible--to evade Margaret Atwood's influence in the dystopian genre. She is the Ur-mother. if there is one, but this text seems to follow (uncomfortably) closely Atwood's concerns about religious hegemony, reproductive rights, and state control.

Postal 2: Apocalypse Weekend

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