Library's review
I’m tempted to crown Atwood the Queen of Dystopia. There aren’t many authors who can make the grim not-so-distant future seem so … inevitable. Her conception of a North America taken entirely over by corporations and their private security forces — CorpSeCorps, one of her many sly bits of wordplay — might have seemed a bit farfetched in 2004 when she wrote the first book of the trilogy, Oryx and Crake, but in 2013 after the U.S. Supreme Court declared that money is equal to free speech in politics, and a major presidential candidate glibly declared “Corporations are people, my friend” during an appearance in my home state, I doubt many people would feel Atwood stretched her point very far at all. After reading about Atwood’s vision of a desperate, ecologically damaged future, the idea of a worldwide pandemic that destroys (almost) all of humankind doesn’t seem like such a bad thing at all. It's not, so to speak, the end of the world.
Of course, it is a bad thing, and the beauty of MaddAddam lies in how Atwood further explores the reality we first encountered in The Year of the Flood, and yet manages not to repeat herself. Flood gave us an up-close and personal look at how one woman, Toby, copes with her total isolation from other humans. In MaddAddam, Atwood ruminates on how that same woman copes with the small group of humans that she encountered at the end of Flood. Not to mention the small group of non-humans, the Crakers, a genetically engineered people meant to rebuild civilization by preserving the best human attributes and eliminating the worst.
The book’s theme is so grim that it might be unreadable except for Atwood’s deft use of humor. In addition to her lively fun with names mentioned earlier, she uses Toby’s interactions with the childlike Crakers to leaven the gloom. Some of the best parts of the book are the passages in which Toby tries to explain the violent, cruel, selfish ways of humans to the kind, gentle, essentially humorless people.
It’s always difficult to read the end of a series peopled by such vivid characters, but overall I was pleased with how Atwood managed to bring a sense of closure to the trilogy. She doesn’t exactly tie things up in a neat little bow, but she plays fair by giving readers a real sense of what life will be like going forward into this not-so-brave new world.
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Months after the Waterless Flood pandemic has wiped out most of humanity, Toby and Ren have rescued their friend Amanda from the vicious Painballers. They return to the MaddAddamite cob house, which is being fortified against man and giant Pigoon alike. Accompanying them are the Crakers, the gentle, quasihuman species engineered by the brilliant but deceased Crake. While their reluctant prophet, Jimmy--Crake's one-time friend--recovers from a debilitating fever, it's left to Toby to narrate the Craker theology, with Crake as Creator. She must also deal with cultural misunderstandings, terrible coffee, and her jealousy over her lover, Zeb. Meanwhile, Zeb searches for Adam One, founder of the God's Gardeners, the pacifist green religion from which Zeb broke years ago to lead the MaddAddamites in active resistance against the destructive CorpSeCorps. Now, under threat of an imminent Painballer attack, the MaddAddamites must fight back with the aid of their newfound allies, some of whom have four trotters. At the center is the extraordinary story of Zeb's past, which involves a lost brother, a hidden murder, a bear, and a bizarre act of revenge.… (more)