MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Oryx and Crake, the first book in the Maddaddam Trilogy, isolated it’s protagonist Jimmy with his experiences, guilt, regrets and memories. The Year of the Flood also isolated it’s protagonists with their wounds and consequences. MaddAddam brings them all together and they need each other to survive. This novel is about relationships and healing. About synthesis bringing disparate elements together in the face of external threat to meet shared goals. Jimmy alone is sick and weak and unable to take care of himself, he needs help from others to survive. Toby is strong and capable but she still needs others to lean on to pull herself out of depression and inaction. Ren and Amanda need others around them to hold up to the pressures of the world and put themselves back together after their traumatic experiences. And most of all the genetically engineered and naive Crakers need some of the knowledge and interpretation of the apocalypse that destroyed humanity to survive.
Even now after the apocalypse in the ashes of society humanity has survived. Not just the God’s Gardeners, MaddAddamites, Jimmy and the Crakers. Some of the worst of humanity have survived are criminals convicted of horrible crimes and forced to participate in the televised death-sport called Painball where they were encouraged to live in savagery and violence for the entertainment of others. Evil still exists and so in the Garden of Eden Crake created by killing the vast majority of the world the period of childhood for the Crakers is ended, bringing pain and suffering and confusion to their world. Can they encompass the changes in mindset to allow them to live in this world? Can they conceptualize evil and how will they react to it?
In the earlier books a numb acceptance of the debauchery of the world suffuses most of the world before the flood. People exist merely to survive amidst the corporate greed, hedonistic excess and rampant consumerism of the corporate controlled world with little to no eye on morality. There are no consequences before the flood for rapists, murderers, abusers and child molesters. Those that try to stand up to the weight of the direction of the world are beaten down and ridiculed, forced to segregate themselves and try to live unaffected by the world around them, but that isn’t tenable and everyone is tainted by the excess of the world. Zeb, Toby, Ren, Amanda. None of them are unaffected by the world around them. They are changed and broken by it but they take action to rise above.
MaddAddam also gives us more backstory about the world before the “waterless flood”, we learn more about Adam One and Zeb. The way everything is tied together with Zeb’s story being told to Toby as they grow an intimate relationship and her relaying parts of that story to the Crakers who integrate it into their nascent mythology is intricate and heartfelt. The petrobaptist megachurch/corporation is amusingly conceived if hyperbolic. Zeb and his comparison to Adam One is interesting and the parallels they go through in their development from beginning to end. The depiction of humanity at its most base, with Painball punishment, greedy religious leaders serving corporate interests and perverse sexual abuse enabled by technology is wearing. The parts of the old world that we are shown it is easy to see the desire to wipe it clean. The chance to make it right.
And Toby is given that chance through the Crakers as they come to her to continue the storytelling tradition that Jimmy established. Through this tradition we are given a glimpse into the power of storytelling as Toby realizes the effects that she is having on the innocent Crakers. She re-frames the story of their creation and the destruction of humanity to try to help them understand while also sheltering them from ideas that she thinks could corrupt them. She adds stories about Zeb to their mythology and uses the stories as a way to explain things the Crakers can’t conceptualize on their own. She gives them the gift of written language to help them remember the stories of the past.
I was a little conflicted by the coincidence that everyone that survived the epidemic was related to Jimmy’s past life. It made the story tightly woven and delightfully self-referential at times. But the implausibility shrank the scope of the world and weakened the impact of the disaster. If all these people survived just because they at one point dated Jimmy then it seems probable that large numbers of people who haven’t dated Jimmy have also survived and just not made it to the tiny geographic bounds explored in the novel.
In reading the other reviews on Goodreads for MaddAddam I found that many of them fell into two camps: those that worship Atwood unquestioningly and gave the book 5 stars with little thought to the why (frequently mentioning her as a pioneer of feminist literature) and others who also praised her for her feminism but criticized this book as a disappointment because it showed Toby, Ren and Amanda in weaker positions, Toby particularly is criticized as fawning over Zeb like a besotted schoolgirl. But these criticisms and praise seem to me to miss the central point of the story and the skill that Atwood has displayed in weaving characters and story together about so much more than just women being equal to men.