In MaddAddam, the third volume of Atwood’s apocalyptic MaddAddam trilogy, she has sent the survivors of Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood to a compound where they await a final showdown. But what gives MaddAddam such tension and light are the final revelations of how this new world came to be, and how the characters made their way to this battle for the future of humanity … Like its predecessors, MaddAddam is as much a story of adolescent longing and disappointment as it is of life before and after the Waterless Flood. In Atwood’s world, hearts broken early in life don’t heal; the larger strokes of politics and plague are less important to these books than the small hurts and jealousies of its survivors...And yet, for all this sorrow, the novel is also filled with humor and joy.
Like its predecessors, MaddAddam is a blend of satiric futurism and magic realism, a snarky but soulful peek at what happens to the world after a mad scientist decimates humanity with a designer disease … What's delightful about this novel is that Atwood always balances philosophically weighty topics with a humorous realism. Yes, there is a search for meaning and spiritual sustenance here, but there are also petty jealousies among the Gardeners and arguments over who will do the chores. Post-apocalyptic life, observes our Gardener protagonist Toby, is kind of like high school … Atwood relishes a good apocalypse, and there is no nostalgic invitation to mourn the loss of humanity here. The waterless flood that pulped our species is never portrayed as anything but the clearcutting we deserved. As a result, there's no ambiguity about the apocalypse bringing about a utopia. Genocide is the best thing that could have happened to us.
In Atwood's near-ish future, global warming has reshaped the landscape — Harvard has drowned, New York City has relocated to New Jersey, and L.A.'s Venice canals have filled with a dirty sea. The rich are ensconced in walled enclaves of plenty while everyone else is left to ‘pleeblands,’ degraded former cities and suburbs rampant with lawlessness … With puns and wordplay, Atwood pokes fun at our reality through the bleak future she's imagined. She prefers the term ‘speculative fiction’ to ‘science fiction’ … Characters that were once resourceful and desperate to survive now mill and mope. When serious conflict finally arrives, it is hidden within layers of storytelling, conveyed as a veiled, soft-focus legend.
I thoroughly enjoyed MaddAddam and the other two books...But they do present an eccentric spectacle – of a fierce, learned intelligence, throwing out references to Robinson Crusoe, Blake and especially Milton, while writing what is essentially an epic B-movie … The best literary SF, such as Cormac McCarthy's The Road, or Atwood's own patriarchal dystopia The Handmaid's Tale, manages to solve these problems. But this time round, I fear, Atwood has preserved the disadvantages, while failing to capitalise on some of the genre's advantages: namely, its ingenuity, and its fast-moving plots. What saves the trilogy is its complexity, its tough-minded satire, and its strangeness. MaddAddam is a wild ride.
In this frightening, but not wholly unfamiliar world, Atwood focuses on the interactions of a small group of rebels: the brilliant but unstable genetic scientist Crake; his sidekick, Jimmy, and Oryx, the woman they both love; a bioterrorist group known as MaddAddam, which communicates through a computer game called Extinctathon; and a pacifist religious cult called God’s Gardeners … Does all this sound totally grim, Brave New World meets Blade Runner meets Escape From New York meets The Road Warrior? It’s not. Atwood’s three-part masterpiece is one of those stories that are thrilling and funny and romantic and touching and, yes, horrific by turns and sometimes all at once. Best of all, MaddAddam, like the final volumes of many other trilogies, draws multiple plot strands together, showing how seemingly disparate elements from the earlier books are really deeply interconnected.
What makes MaddAddam and its previous installments so unique though is the way Atwood treats dystopia not just as a metaphor but as a real, complex, and ultimately human event …. The point-of-view switches exist because there are several stories inside of stories. The tale of Toby’s lover Zeb switches been a faux-present and past-tense and is intercut with the conversation between Zeb and Toby about what is going on ‘right now.’ It’s not only effective, realistic, and creative, but it’s funny, too … In terms of plot, MaddAddam is all over the place, tantalizing you with one kind of story then leading you into another piece of backstory you could never have seen coming. Whenever I felt like a character or situation was abandoned for another direction the novel was taking, I instantly felt cheated..and yet, the book is a page-turner. Not in any kind of whodunit or adventure sort of way, but instead, thematically.
MaddAdam, the bulk of which occurs over a period of weeks, offers layers upon layers of storytelling as the new society takes shape. Toby ends up serving as a cultural liaison with the innocent Crakers, telling them a story every night about the past … Zeb fills Toby (and readers) in on his past as a hacker and environmental activist as well as his and Adam's hideously abusive childhood. Along the way, readers catch glimpses of Crake as a boy known as Glenn, see how the survivors of the plague are linked together, and learn the reasons behind Adam One's unusually accurate prediction of the end of humanity … The science of MaddAddam is particularly interesting: When Atwood began the trilogy more than a decade ago, many of the inventions she described sounded much farther-fetched than they do today.
The profound ignorance and innocence of the Crakers allow Atwood to exercise her waggish wit and to play with the complexities and absurdities of understanding and communication — as Toby tries to explain, for instance, what writing is, why creatures die, why humans have two skins (clothes), all in the language of Dick and Jane made mythic. Furthermore, the Crakers have become fascinated with Zeb, whose story is coaxed out of him by a perhaps even more interested Toby, who in turn narrates it to the Crakers … There is something funny, even endearing, about such a dark and desperate view of a future — a ravaged world emerging from alarmingly familiar trends — that is so jam-packed with the gifts of imagination, invention, intelligence and joy.
This is a complicated scenario. Atwood handles it well. Repetition becomes recursiveness, and she writes with insight and no pretension about how narratives work with and through one another: ‘There’s the story, then there’s the real story, then there’s the story of how the story came to be told.’ She tells all these sorts of stories in MaddAddam satisfyingly, and of course, beautifully … Eventually, toward MaddAddam’s conclusion, birth and decay, death and growth bring about quite a different world than the one in which the trilogy began. But tales are still told, and in this, the third and final book, Atwood presents a moving and convincing case for our stories’ continued existence long after we’re gone.
This is a convincingly rendered world — at times harrowing and hilarious (the Crakers have ‘built in insect-repellant’ when bugs are the least of their problems). With moments of psychological precision, Atwood explores the nature of evolution, the need for humans to lose their ‘grinning, elemental malice,’ and how a civilization must transcend its destructive past. But, unfortunately, the narrative is cumbersome, even silly at times (not in a good way). Characters become unintentional caricatures and eventually the story devolves into elusive fractured vignettes.
Atwood allows not only optimism into her vision of a post-plague society, but also a good deal of humor and the beginnings of a new creation mythology and holy book … This time the story is told mostly from the point of view of Toby, a former Gardener. With Snowman-the-Jimmy, the Crakers’ reluctant prophet, sick and hallucinating, she ends up serving as a de facto apostle as she tells the childlike Crakers the story of their beginnings. Storytelling, it seems, is just as important to survival as food and shelter. Toby (who, incidentally, can converse with bees) struggles as she tries to satisfy the curiosity of a species whose questions never stop coming.
The survivors are a traumatized, cynical group with harshly tested self-preservation skills, but they have the capacity for love and self-sacrifice, which in a simpler story would signal hope for the future of humankind. However, Atwood dramatizes the importance of all life so convincingly that readers will hesitate to assume that the perpetuation of a species as destructive as man is the novel’s central concern … Her vision is as affirming as it is cautionary, and the conclusion of this remarkable trilogy leaves us not with a sense of despair at mankind’s failings but with a sense of awe at humanity’s barely explored potential to evolve.
In numerous interludes, Toby attempts to explain this world to the Crakers, and their dialogue, rife with miscommunications, is at once comic and strongly biblical in tone. Societies invent origin stories, Atwood suggests, by stripping off nuance for simplicity’s sake. But Atwood herself has taken care to layer this story with plenty of detail—and, like most post-apocalyptic novelists, closes out the story with just a touch of optimism.
