Note: this discussion includes the second and third books of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. I already wrote about Oryx And Crake, the first book in the series.
I cannot think of another trilogy where the contemporary timeline covers as little space as it does in this series. The Year of the Flood covers the same period as Oryx and Crake, introducing the perspectives of Toby and Ren, two women who live in the Pleeblands outside the compounds and find themselves caught up with the God’s Gardeners, a pacifistic nature cult that rejects the course society has taken.
Ren, born of the compounds, accompanies her mother into the Pleeblands where she spends many of her formative years, before returning to a life on the margins of the compound school. Toby’s life is harder, hiding from the authorities by working at a SecretBurger (real meat, a rarity!) joint for Blanco, a manager with a temper and a penchant for choosing female employees, compelling them to perform sexual acts on him, and in time raping them to death—if he doesn’t kill them some other way first. Toby joins the Gardeners the moment she quits because they hide her from Blanco. She doesn’t really believe the doctrines that say there is a Waterless Flood on the horizon, but is tough and resourceful, and the God’s Gardeners are willing to protect her.
Much as Jimmy/Snowman from Oryx and Crake, both women survive the flood, Toby through clean living in her job at AnooYoo Spa, Ren while in quarantine at “Scales and Tails,” the upscale strip club where she works. The Year of the Flood is thus a re-visitation of OaC, bringing the stories up to the present. MaddAddam adds a fourth core character, the enigmatic Zeb, Ren’s adoptive father among the Gardeners and Toby’s secret love, while Toby continues the work that Snowman began, teaching the Crakers about the world.
Most of the strengths of OaC carry through the rest of the series. The world remains disturbingly plausible, and its monstrosity is heightened by the Gardener point of view. We are introduced to their saints, such as Rachel Carson, their veneration of the natural world, and all of the cracks in the Utopian ideal of the Compounds. The Year of the Flood introduces Painball, a death-match between teams of convicts. The victors receive pardon, but leave something of their humanity behind. (By the contemporary timeline, Blanco is a three-time Painball victor.) MaddAddam explores the world of the PetroBaptists and the rise of CorpSeCorps security services through Zeb and his brother Adam, the original founder of the Gods Gardeners.
My main complaint with these two books was that everything fit together too well. That is to say, the world is large enough that people can vanish for years at a time, but small enough that everyone seems to know everyone else—and Jimmy in particular. The result is that the book feels like it is written around Oryx and Crake and reliant on that book, or at least Jimmy to give it meaning. These characters are more interesting than Jimmy (his dullness being one of my issues with the first book), but the whole process came off as reductive. MaddAddam deals less with the earlier time period outside of nested stories and thus mostly circumvents this issue.
The Year of the Flood was my favorite of the three, despite it suffering the most from the issue I described above. I liked the characters of Toby and, to a lesser extent Ren, and the God’s Gardeners are a fascinating set. I still believe that the strongest part of this series is the worldbuilding, at once fascinating, disturbing, and plausible. The storytelling is expertly done in all three books, but I found the characterization and plot lacking when held up to Atwood’s best.
I called Oryx and Crake an origin story, and this comment needs to be amended. The entire MaddAddam trilogy functions as a multi-faceted origin story wherein the ambitions of humankind climbed too high, leaving only a select few Adams and Eves and Crakers left to rebuild after a flood.
ΔΔΔ
I finished Wesley Chu’s The Rise of Io over the weekend and will post some thoughts about it soon. I’m now reading Charles Mann’s 1493, a global history of the Columbian Exchange and the development of the “Homogenocene” Epoch.
Noodlings 