MaddAddam: A Novel Hardcover – Deckle Edge, September 3, 2013

I've been a fan of post-apocalyptic fiction since I first read EARTH ABIDES when I was in high school. I've probably read them all, to greater or lesser degrees of enjoyment. It's rare to find such a novel written by a literary great - a George Orwell, or an Aldous Huxley, or a Cormac McCarthy. Or a Margaret Atwood. Her HANDMAID'S TALE is one of my all-time favorites, and I gobbled up ORYX AND CRAKE when it was released in 2004. MADDADDAM is the third in what has been called Atwood's "MaddAddam Trilogy," and it concludes the story began in ORYX AND CRAKE and continued in THE YEAR OF THE FLOOD.

The story begins just as YEAR OF THE FLOOD ends - Toby and Ren have rescued Amanda from the vile Painballers who had kidnapped her, the two villains have been tied to a tree for safekeeping, Snowman (guardian of the so-called "Children of Crake," or "Crakers") is gravely ill from an infection, and the gentle Crakers are singing their strange songs. What happens in MADDADDAM is mainly Toby's story, and Zeb's story, told through Toby. Much of it is told in flashbacks (things that happened in the years before the "Waterless Flood" destroyed all human life on Earth, and in the years just after that pandemic). But in the novel's final act, things happen that conclude the trilogy in a very satisfying way.

For those who have not read the first two novels (or those - like me - who have forgotten major details of the story), Atwood provides a brief introduction called "The Story So Far." This is a great help, and will refresh readers as to who these characters are and how the world came to be as it is. In ORYX AND CRAKE, we learned how Crake engineered a pandemic that wiped out most human life. But first, he created the Crakers through genetic engineering, a race of gentle, kind humanoid beings without violent tendencies or dangerous human emotions - the Crakers have natural insect repellent in their blood, eat only leaves and grass, and mate only when they are in estrus (or "heat"). There is no jealousy among them, no pettiness, no greed - none of the things that led the human race to turn the world into a virtual garbage can. In some ways, the Crakers are reminiscent of the Eloi (from Wells's THE TIME MACHINE), a sheep-like herd of newly-evolved humans without either a competitive drive or a natural instinct for self-preservation. But Atwood's Crakers are much, much more than that, as MADDADDAM reveals.

In YEAR OF THE FLOOD, we met Toby and the other "God's Gardeners" (a "green religious group" focused on reverence for the earth), and Zeb and Adam (who fought the Corps that controlled the world through the MaddAddam Chat Room), and the evil Painballers (who survived the Corps-sponsored battles in the Painball Arenas and became rapists, murderers, and cannibals).

The world Atwood has created in this trilogy is one that seems totally believable, a natural progression from the political fallout of our twenty-first century world. The clash between those who worship oil and wealth, and those committed to protecting the Earth, has morphed into a reality in which corporations (supported by religion) control everything and science has been perverted into a means of creating genetically engineered plants and animals to satisfy an increasing demand for "products" (for example, the "Pigoons" were created by splicing human and pig genes to grow organs for human transplant, and the "Mo'Hairs" are able to produce colorful, silky human hair for wigs). This is a depressing and horrific vision of a future that might actually happen, that is perhaps already happening in subtle, insidious ways. And as such MADDADDAM is decidedly terrifying.

At the same time, Atwood's vision of a future in which the dominant races may not be totally human is ultimately hopeful. The Pigoons, it turns out, are not just pigs with human genetic material, and the Crakers are not just placid, mindless singers. By the end of MADDADDAM I was reminded of Octavia Butler's LILITH'S BROOD, in which humanity is virtually lost but becomes something else altogether, something very different but perhaps just as wondrous.

Atwood's writing is challenging, and there's no way to read MADDADDAM for its plot (which is the least important aspect of the novel). Instead, read it for its vision into what being human has become, what it once was, and what it could be in a future of our own making. In ORYX AND CRAKE, Crake wiped out most of the human race, hoping to "reboot" the world, to begin again in a different way. In MADDADDAM, Atwood gives us a glimpse of what that rebooted world might be like and what it might mean for the handful of human beings left alive. It's a terrifying, beautiful, and uplifting story, all at once. I recommend it to any fan of post-apocalyptic fiction, or to any lover of great literature. Atwood is a wonderful writer, and MADDADDAM is a satisfying ending to a great trilogy.

Clearly, I'm in a small minority here, but I was utterly disappointed by MaddAddam. It's not only a limp conclusion to the trilogy; it's a sequel that is so badly conceived--so slipshod in its plotting, such a betrayal of the characterization of the first two works, and so much a boring retread of themes more cleverly presented the first two times around--that it actually diminishes the achievement of the earlier novels. It may, in fact, be the worst follow-up to a successful novel that I've ever read. If Oryx & Crake is Star Wars, then this novel is The Phantom Menace.

*SPOILERS ALERT*

There's simply no way to talk about the novel's failures without referring to specific plot points, so read no further if you intend to read MaddAddam but haven't read it yet.

The first problem is, having contrived to have Snowman and the Crakers meet up with the survivors of the MaddAddam / God's Gardener's group at the end of both of the previous novels, Atwood was, very clearly, at a total loss as to what to do with them next, how to move the story forward. Therefore, the "forward" plot movement of the novel only starts in earnest after p. 261, when it is (very implausibly) revealed that the Crakers (the genetically-modified humans) can communicate with the pigoons (the genetically-modified pigs) and the latter want the the normal Homo Sapiens's help with killing the two "painballers" captured at the end of Year of the Flood, but who were allowed to escape at the very beginning of this novel (another feeble implausibility). This, despite the fact that the MaddAddamites themselves have also been killing and eating the pigoons all along. So, the remaining humans, relying on the pigoons' sense of smell and a Craker translator, track the two killers down, but not before Snowman and Adam One are allowed to die comically melodramatic, self-sacrificing deaths, worthy of the most sentimentally piffling of Dickens's endings.

Atwood does understand that this wee episode--"bad guys escape; good guys hang around doing nothing in particular for several months; good guys track down bad guys"--isn't nearly enough of a plot to construct an entire novel around. So, most of the novel has nothing to do with that. Instead, it's backstory--yet more backstory, in a series of novels that has already consisted largely of flashbacks--this time about the previously peripheral character of Zeb.

Alas, this new backstory must rank as some of the very worst writing Atwood has ever done. It is completely haphazard, un-thought-out, driveling, and trivial. It reads, for all the world, like a very bad parody of Thomas Pynchon. Zeb steals millions of dollars from his father, a corrupt fraud of a fundamentalist preacher, and goes on the lam, spending hundreds of pages flitting from one nonsensical disguise to another: a pilot for an environmental group aiding polar bears, a burger flipper, a professional hacker, a magician's assistant, a toilet cleaner, a bouncer, a gardener, a data-entry drone...and probably others I'm forgetting. Not a single one of these incarnations is well-developed...or even lasts long enough long enough for me to begin to be interested in the new environment where Atwood has randomly inserted Zeb, always for only a single chapter, with no rhyme or reason. Whether working the most menial of jobs or more middle-class covers there's *never* actually a compelling reason for Zeb to be where he finds himself, especially since he supposedly has millions in the bank. It's all a chaotic, vapid shaggy dog story with no punchline at the end, told largely in annoyingly ersatz Raymond Chandler-eque "tough guy" speak.

Worse than the unnecessariness of Zeb's story, though, is the sheer sloppiness of its plotting. At one point, for instance, Zeb is assigned the important task of smuggling some dangerous new bio-engineered pills out of the HelthWyzer West compound where he has been working. The description of this goes on for pages and pages: the precautions Zeb takes when leaving the compound; the precautions taken hiding them at his new place of employ; how careful they are not to reveal the hiding place. Then, on a whim, he uses half of the pills in an act of revenge, and mayhem ensues. Following this, the person who asked him to smuggle the pills in the first place, Pilar, decides it might just be a good idea to find out what's actually in them. But then that plan to analyze the pills is casually abandoned, and the mysterious pills are simply retained by Pilar. And then, equally casually, after some years, they are sent to the young Crake as a legacy after Pilar's demise. And then Crake (it is presumed) uses them as the basis for his own BlyssPlus pills that destroy humanity.

Huh?

What a muddle. All these cloak-and-dagger peregrinations and machinations...but then Crake gets the keys to destroying humanity almost as an afterthought? Or did the saintly Pilar of YOTF actually intend that he use them in precisely that way? Atwood's intentions here are entirely opaque. It's especially frustrating, as the long-hinted-at connection between the God's Gardeners and Crake otherwise never comes to full fruition. Likewise, Zeb and Adam have to live in hiding for years and years, but then end up living together openly in the same community using their real names? It hardly makes any sense.

In all, MaddAddam reads like a first draft that nobody dared question or revise--an improvisation in which loose ends, instead of being tied up, are multiplied exponentially.

Also, as a scant handful of insightful reviewers here have pointed out, the characters of Toby, Ren, Amanda, and Snowman (irritatingly referred to here mostly as "Snowman-the-Jimmy") bear only a passing resemblance to the major characters of the same name in the earlier novels. Tough, self-reliant Toby of YOTF has become a simpering and pathetically insecure helpmate to Zeb--forever girlishly worried that he's eyeing one of the younger surviving women. Ren is a virtual non-entity, relegated to one or two unmemorable lines every 50 pages or so. And Snowman spends most of the book in a coma...and when he finally wakes up, he's without a scintilla of the self-awareness or irony that animated the narrative voice of Oryx & Crake. The "continuity" failure in relation to the previous novels is almost complete. And the brief reappearance of Adam as a hostage at the end of novel proves to be pointless as well as being utterly beyond belief.

Being Atwood, the novel is, of course, not 100% bad. There's a good deal of wit in Toby's attempts to render Zeb's stories about his life into a form the innocent Crakers can comprehend and use as the basis for a newly-minted bible / creation myth of their own. And some of the details about day-to-day life in a post-Apocalyptic world are cleverly worked out.

On the whole, however, this is a very sorry misstep from an author I've previously admired very much. I rather wish I hadn't read it and had spared myself this saccharine and third-rate chaser to the enjoyable Oryx & Crake and Year of the Flood.