Margaret Atwood — surely the cleverest of the clever — returns to the future in her disconcerting-yet-likable new novel, “The Year of the Flood.”

Here she gives us the same imaginary-world-to-come themes of her critically praised “Oryx and Crake” along with some of that novel’s creatures, persona and landscapes. And, while Atwood couldn’t have known it when writing her latest book, its “flood” is eerily akin to what we dread with H1N1 — a plague capable of wiping out humankind.

“May I remind you all about the importance of hand-washing, seven times a day at least, and after every encounter with a stranger,” admonishes Adam One, the kind head of God’s Gardeners, a counterculture community in the book.

“Avoid anyone who is sneezing,” Adam One says before concluding, as always, with the exhortation “Let us sing.”

Waterless and indiscriminate, the never-identified (but apparently human-caused) flood/infestation is over by the start of “The Year of the Flood” — leaving us two unlikely narrators (both women and perhaps the sole survivors) plus a series of flashbacks revealing a pre-flood netherworld that only Atwood could have conjured.

There is the post-Babylonesque existence of the upper class, ruled by the ruthless Corporations and their violent CorpSeCorps, and there is the peaceable underground community overseen by Adam One, the gentle environmentalist.

Biblical, wise — but with decidedly unrealistic expectations— he calls together his minions in their shapeless, drab clothes and outlandish nosecones:

“Let us today remember Noah, the chosen caregiver of the Species,” he prays. “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.”

When the flood comes, Adam One and his followers are presumably swept away, too — but not Ren and not Toby and a handful of other Gardeners, at least not at first.

It is at this point that a reader can imagine Atwood, Canada’s preeminent author, at home in Toronto (mere miles from Buffalo), chuckling at the rest of us while creating an alter-world that is both amusing and terrifying—and too close to possibility to make for comfortable reading.

Ren, an adolescent making do as a dancer at the sex club Scales and Tails, is trapped in a safe room in the club, with a dwindling food supply, but access to a telecast.

“The news jockeys were trying to keep calm,” she observes. “The experts didn’t know what the superbug was, but it was a pandemic for sure, and a lot of people were dying fast — just sort of melting — and a few days after that, there wasn’t any more news.”

Toby, a tender soul somewhat older than Ren, is working undercover at the AnooYou Spa when the flood overtakes most of perceivable humanity.

“There must be someone else left. . . she can’t be the only one on the planet,” Toby thinks. “There must be others. But friends or foes? If she sees one, how to tell?”

If neither woman really moves a reader, both are remarkable in their perseverance against the greatest of odds. And, if Atwood’s peculiar way of jumping from post-flood to pre-flood and back again is disorienting, her wondrous wit, and fascination with words, more than save the day.

Take some of the icons of the Gardeners — Saint Maria Sibylla Merian of Insect Metamorphosis, Saint Euell of Wild Foods, Saint Stephen Jay Gould of the Jurassic Shales, Saint Jane Jacobs. Take a word like “glean,” here meaning to pick up or acquire.

Indeed, Atwood’s latest world is one in which Gardeners sign up for Urban Bloodshed Limitation Classes, ride in solarcars, associate with pleebrats (only at a Gardener’s own risk), and avoid the grenes of the Gangrene gang. Painball is a prison, a hospital is a Recovery Hut, there are no marriages, only pair-bondings.

The Gardeners have only one electronic item, a functioning laptop: “It’s like the Vatican porn collection, safe in our hands.” Rumor becomes synonymous with the daily news. One eats weeds, wild onion and asparagus and fiddleheads.

It’s a heady, sometimes captivating, fantasy. But beneath it all are very real issues—not only pestilence but global warming, genetic engineering, dwindling resources, endangered species and an erosion of compassion and respect for mankind.

At times, it must be noted, a reader imagines that Atwood is playing with us, putting us to the test, lording it over us. But she is far too provocative to put down.

Plus, there are Adam One’s sermons, each followed by a different verse from “The God’s Gardeners Oral Hymnbook.”

In her Acknowledgments at the end of the novel, Atwood points out that “the clearest influence on Gardener hymn lyrics is William Blake, with an assist from John Bunyan and also from The Hymn Book of the Anglican Church of Canada and the United Church of Canada.”

Then, in an unexpected note, Atwood tells us that the hymns have been set to music by singer and musician Orville Stoeber of Venice, Calif., and can be heard on the CD, “Hymns of the God’s Gardeners.”

“Anyone who wishes to use any of these hymns for amateur devotional or environmental purposes is more than welcome to do so,” Atwood says, giving Web sites where one might visit the hymns, including www.yearoftheflood.com.

As Adam One would indubitably suggest, “Let us sing.”

Karen Brady is a retired News columnist.