Page - 42 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/02

Gardeners hardly partake in the capitalist world, they still sell some of their products at “the tree of life market”, which shows how all worlds are intercon- nected and overlap at their margins. In opposition to the inauthenticity of the compounds, the Gardeners’ lifestyle and their products are seen as “authentic” by their contemporaries living in the compounds: “the Gardener produce was the real thing. It stank of authenticity: the Gardeners might be fanatical and amusingly bizarre, but at least they were ethical.”39 The God’s Gardeners also attribute “being ethical” to themselves and their way of living – a belief which is reinforced by their awaiting the apocalypse. For them, the story of the apoc- alypse functions as a moral structuring device par excellence, and furthermore mirrors the original meaning of the term as hopeful revelation: We God’s Gardeners are a plural Noah: we too have been called, we too forewarned. We can feel the symptoms of coming disaster as a doctor feels a sick man’s pulse. We must be ready for the time when those who have broken trust with the Animals – yes, wiped them from the face of the Earth where God placed them – will be swept away by the waterless Flood which will be carried on the wings of God’s dark Angels that fly by night, and in airplanes and helicopters and bullet trains, and on transport trucks and other such conveyances.40 It remains open whether Crake is the sole initiator of the plan to rid the planet of its human malady, or whether some of the God’s Gardeners are complicit in his plan, as they also aspire towards an apocalypse they call “the waterless flood”, which would cleanse the earth from a destructive human culture. Like its biblical precursor, the worldview represented by Crake and the Gardeners entails a mor- al map in which the pre-apocalyptic world is found evil and untenable and hope is directed towards a post-apocalyptic New Jerusalem, or Eden in the Garden- ers’ jargon, as this sermon held by Adam One shortly after the plague indicates: What a cause for rejoicing is this rearranged world in which we find ourselves! True, there is a certain – let us not say disappointment. The debris left by the Waterless Flood, like that left by any receding flood, is not attractive. It will take time for our longed-for Eden to appear, my Friends. But how privileged are we to witness these first precious moments of Rebirth! How much clearer the air is, now that man-made pollution has ceased!41 In opposition to Crake, however, the Gardeners see the root of evil not in the human genetic make-up, as the term Anthropocene (the age of human) implies, but in the toxic lifestyle of late capitalism. 39 Atwood 2010, 170. 40 Atwood 2010, 110. 41 Atwood 2010, 443. 42 | Stephanie Bender www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 31–50