Review by New York Times Review
Margaret Atwood brings her dystopian trilogy to a conclusion. "WHERE, WHERE IS THE TOWN?" Talkin g Heads sang. "Now, it's nothing but flowers." What a joy it is to see Margaret Atwood taking such delicious pleasure in the end of the world. And it is nothing but flowers. 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. Atwood has brought the previous two books together in a fitting and joyous conclusion that's an epic not only of an imagined future but of our own past, an exposition of how oral storytelling traditions led to written ones and ultimately to our sense of origin. Speaking about the last volume of this trilogy is like discussing only the center panel of Hieronymus Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights." While there's enough detail, both beautiful and grotesque, to engage a reader, it's very much part of a whole. The book begins with four pages of catch-up for those who need it, but since the treat of reading both previous novels lay in the gradual understanding of the world Atwood created, and because the final volume contains such lush satisfactions of narrative and invention, it would be a shame not to have that full experience. The mode of "MaddAddam" is oral history, used intermittently as Toby, one of the female survivors of "The Year of the Flood," tries to explain the origin of things to the Children of Crake, who appeared in the first pages of the series's initial volume, "Oryx and Crake." These creatures are the bioengineered new people a young scientist created just before he triggered the plague that would wipe out the human race. Instead of the zombified mutants of most post-apocalyptic worlds, these are Garden of Eden creatures, naked and childlike, though capable of tremendous sexual freedom, and the few humans leftalive understand that the world, such as it is, will be leftto them. Luminous-eyed, vegetarian, copulating merrily, they listen to Toby's stories as gospel. And yet she's inventing as she goes along. As she tells them (and us) tales of the humans we have met and their journeys to this compound, she simplifies and glorifies them. She makes gods of men and Edens of laboratories ; she makes sense from what we know was chaos. And, gradually, we realize that this is how we ourselves understand our own world. The main story Toby tells is that of Zeb, now her lover in the guarded compound, a man we first met in "The Year of the Flood" as a rough new arrival to the God's Gardeners, an earthly tribe in former days, preparing for the Waterless Flood. That book's arrangement as a hymnal praising the saints of natural science is excellent preparation for the biblical tone of Toby's tale. Zeb came into that book as a mystery, and here we learn of his childhood upbringing by the Rev of the Church of PetrOleum (a close relative of today's prosperity gospel) and his eventual escape into a life on the run, first to San Francisco's "pleeblands," then to a job as a magician's assistant, to survival in the Canadian wilderness after a "Bearlift" mission goes wrong, to New New York (on the Jersey Shore) and at last into work at a HelthWyzer laboratory compound, where he meets characters familiar to us as members of an underground movement. 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. Toby's telling of Zeb's story is interspersed with the present-day defense of the compound, and it mirrors her own insecurities about her lover. When she asks about a woman he once knew , he's silent. "Will this be a painful story?" she asks herself. "It's likely: most stories about the past have an element of pain in them, now that the past has been ruptured so violently, so irreparably." Then she adds: "But not, surely, for the first time in human history." And yet, for all this sorrow, the novel is also filled with humor and joy. Mo'Hair sheep, bred with long shining colored fleeces able to be transplanted onto human scalps, roam about bleating helplessly. Green glowing rabbits hop in the underbrush, chased by owls. Toby's storytelling contains her clearly irritated responses to the unheard comments of the Children of Crake. "Thank you for saying good night," she tells them. "I am happy to know that you want me to sleep soundly, without bad dreams." But when they go on and on, obeying by endlessly bidding her "good night," she finally says, "That's enough. You can stop," followed by an exhausted: "Thank you." Atwood's prose miraculously balances humor, outrage and beauty. A simple description becomes both chilling and sublime: "They set out the next morning just at sunrise. The vultures that top the taller, deader trees are spreading their black wings so the dew on them will evaporate; they're waiting for the thermals to help them liftand spiral. Crows are passing the rumors, one rough syllable at a time. The smaller birds are stirring, beginning to cheep and trill; pink cloud filaments float above the eastern horizon, brightening to gold at the lower edges." In so much genre fiction, language is sacrificed to plot and invention. It's a pleasure to read a futuristic novel whose celebration of beauty extends to the words themselves. And words are very important here; by the moving end of "Madd Addam," we understand how language and writing produced the beautiful fiction that described our beginnings. Atwood's future may have bits of brightness, but our present does not. As she states in her acknowledgments, "Although 'MaddAddam' is a work of fiction, it does not include any technologies or biobeings that do not already exist, are not under construction or are not possible in theory." The setting is our own century. The gated science compounds are some of the recognizable demons of our age, and the monsters that roam free, post-Armageddon, are already glints in some bioengineer's eye. Toby imagines the creator's thoughts before the end: "The people in the chaos cannot learn. They cannot understand what they are doing to the sea and the sky and the plants and the animals. They cannot understand that they are killing them, and that they will end by killing themselves. . . . So there is only one thing leftto do." "I thought that we'd start over," sang Talking Heads, "but I guess I was wrong." Wrong indeed. This finale to Atwood's ingenious trilogy lights a fire from the fears of our age, then douses it with hope for the planet's survival. But that survival may not include us. MADDADDAM By Margaret Atwood 394 pp. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. $27.95. ANDREW SEAN GREER'S latest novel, "The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells," was published in June.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 15, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Ten years after Oryx & Crake (2003) rocked readers the world over, Atwood brings her cunning, impish, and bracing speculative trilogy following The Year of the Flood (2009) to a gritty, stirring, and resonant conclusion. In the wreckage of a maniacal bioengineering empire, Toby, a can-do gal and a key member of the once thriving God's Gardeners, a peaceful green resistance group, reconnects with her great unrequited love, Zeb, of the MaddAddamite bioterrorists. All tactical differences evaporate in the wake of the apocalyptic pandemic as their small band of survivors fights off fiendishly violent Painballers and marauding part-pig, part-human pigoons. The bioengineered Crakers purring, kudzu-eating, sexually rambunctious, story-demanding quasihumans worship Jimmy, whom they call Snowman. When he falls ill, Toby steps up. Her pseudoreligious attempts to explain life to the Crakers are hilarious and poignant, compared to Zeb's shocking and riveting stories about his father, the malevolent head of the Church of PetrOleum, and what turned Zeb into MaddAddam. Atwood is ascendant, from her resilient characters to the feverishly suspenseful plot involving battles, spying, cyberhacking, murder, and sexual tension. Most resounding is Atwood's vibrant creation of a scientifically plausible, regenerating, and evolving world driven not simply by the reproductive imperative but also by a cell-deep need for stories. The coruscating finale in an ingenious, cautionary trilogy of hubris, fortitude, wisdom, love, and life's grand obstinacy. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Atwood will tour the country and appear on major broadcast and social media to exuberantly promote the extraordinary closing novel in her best-selling trilogy.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The final entry in Atwood's brilliant MaddAddam trilogy roils with spectacular and furious satire. The novel begins where Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood end, just after most of the human species has been eradicated by a man-made plague. The early books explore a world of terrifying corporate tyranny, horrifying brutality, and the relentless rape of women and the planet. In Oryx and Crake, the pandemic leaves wounded protagonist Jimmy to watch over the Crakers, a humanoid species bioengineered to replace humankind by the man responsible for unleashing the plague. In The Year of the Flood, MaddAddamites wield science to terrorize corporate villains while God's Gardeners use prayer and devotion to the Earth to prepare for the approaching cataclysm. Toby, a God's Gardener and key character in the second book, narrates the third installment, in which a few survivors, including MaddAddamites, God's Gardeners, Jimmy, and the Crakers, navigate a postapocalyptic world. Toby is reunited with Zeb, her MaddAddamite romantic interest in Year of the Flood, and the two become leaders and defenders of their new community. 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. With childlike stubbornness, even the peaceful Crakers demand mythology and insist on deifying people whose motives they can't understand. Other species genetically engineered for exploitation by now-extinct corporations roam the new frontier; some are hostile to man, including the pigoons-a powerful and uniquely perceptive source of bacon and menace. Threatening humans, Crakers, and pigoons are Painballers-former prisoners dehumanized in grotesque life-or-death battles. The Crakers cannot fight, the bloodthirsty Painballers will not yield, and the humans are outnumbered by the pigoons. Happily, Atwood has more surprises in store. 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. Agent: Vivienne Schuster, Curtis Brown Literary Agency (U.K.). (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This is the final installment in Atwood's epic trilogy (After Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood) chronicling a postapocalyptic world in which a human-made plague has wiped out most of civilization, leaving behind a small group of human survivors and a clan of genetically engineered semi-humans called the Crakers. While familiarity with the preceding books will magnify the pleasures of this one, it isn't strictly necessary, as readers are quickly brought up to speed. The theme of storytelling is central: what it means and why it matters and its ethical and philosophical implications. In typical Atwood style, all of this is grounded in vivid descriptions of this new physical world and underlined by her unique brand of brutal humor. In spite of the dark subject matter, one can't help but take delight in -Atwood's creation. Appropriately, this is both a caution against and a praise for our human desire to leave our mark on the world we see as ours. Bernadette Dunn and Bob Walter bring convincing grit to Toby and Zeb, the book's compelling central characters. Robbie Daymond comes in late in the audiobook as the young Craker Blackbeard, adding a satisfyingly rueful note to the final chapters. -Verdict Essential listening for fans of speculative fiction and longtime fans of Atwood, but even readers who fall into neither category should find this a compelling odyssey, well suited to audio. ["Certainly of great interest to Atwood fans...and for fans of dystopian/postapocalyptic fiction generally, this finale is a gripping read," concurred the review of the Nan A. Talese: Doubleday hc, LJ 8/13.-Ed.]-Heather Malcolm, Bow, WA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Atwood closes her post-apocalyptic trilogy (Oryx and Crake, 2003; The Year of the Flood, 2009) with a study of a small camp of survivors, redolent with suggestions about how new-world mythologies are made. The main narrator, Toby, is a gatherer of strays at MaddAddam, an enclave of survivors of the previous years' plague and environmental collapse. Amanda was tormented by vicious "Painballers"; Snowman, the hero of Oryx and Crake, is recovering from a grotesque foot wound; and a small tribe of "Crakers," genetically engineered humanoids, are on site as well. Atwood's story moves in two directions. Looking backward, Toby's love, Zeb, recalls the history of the scientists who set this odd new world in motion while greedy evangelists like his father clung to rapidly depleting oil and cash reserves. Looking forward, the MaddAddamites must police the compound for Painballers out for revenge. As with many post-apocalyptic tales, the past is much more interesting than the present: Zeb's story is a cross sections of end-times North America, from Grand Guignol entertainments to pharmaceutical horrors, and Atwood weaves in some off-the-shelf contempt for casual sexism, consumerism and god-playing. In comparison, the closing confrontation between the MaddAddamites and Painballers is thin, though the alliances are provocative: The Crakers partner with large, genetically engineered pigs--pigoons--to help the surviving humans who unnaturally made them. 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. By no means her finest work, but Atwood remains an expert thinker about human foibles and how they might play out on a grand scale.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
