‘MaddAddam’ is
the final volume in the near future dystopian trilogy that started with ‘Oryx
and Crake’ and continued with ‘The Year of the Flood’. While the events in the
first two novels about the end of the world as we know it took place at the
same time, albeit with different casts of characters, ‘MaddAddam’ moves us
forward in time and unites the two sets of characters. Jimmy, once Crake’s best
friend, now deathly ill with an infection, is in the care of the remnants of
God’s Gardeners, an ecological/religious group, who also find themselves the
caretakers of the Craker’s, those innocent, leaf eating people who Crake
created as replacements for the fatally flawed human race. The group is also
imperiled by two of the Painballers- former prisoners who earned their freedom
in gladiator style fights that burned out their ability to feel empathy and
left them with a huge appetite for torture- who are lurking in the forest that
surround their home and garden. An even
bigger peril they face is the fact that food and other supplies are rapidly
running out; it’s getting harder and harder to find anything useful in the
remnants of the city, and they have no ideas how to survive in Stone Age
conditions.
While the plot
that moves the book along is how the group deals with the Painballers, it
really doesn’t take up much of the text. The majority of the story is Zeb’s
history: how he and his brother (who became MaddAddam) grew up tortured by
their father, the head of the Church of PetrOleum; and the close calls he had after
running away. This history serves to tell us about how the world right before
the apocalypse was functioning.
It’s a horrific
world that God’s Gardeners and the rest inhabit, but t he real horror is that
humans already possess the technology to make all the creatures in this book,
including the deadly diseases that wipe out humanity and the Painballers with
their inability to care about anyone other than themselves. We are already on
the course of megacorporations taking over our lives and government. Ice caps
are already melting and permafrost thawing. The gap between rich and poor
widens.
‘MaddAddam’ is
brilliantly written and serves as a warning about the path we’re headed down.
But it’s not preachy; it’s a damn good adventure story. My only complaint was
with the character of Toby; in ‘Year of the Flood’ she is an incredibly strong
person, focused and capable. In ‘MaddAddam’, we witness her relationship with
Zeb turning her into an insecure, jealous woman, tortured by doubts about Zeb’s
feelings for her and whether he is having sex with other women- especially one
who is putting on a display of her sexual readiness for all the males of the
camp. This bothered me a lot to see Toby reduced to this state, but later I
wondered: was she written like this to compare her to the Crakers, who have no
sexual jealousy? Or to show that in a situation where the world has ended and
must be rebuilt, the fertile woman is reduced to her ability to repopulate the
world? Or perhaps just that no matter what happens in the larger world, human
beings will be human beings. I don’t know, but I found it very irritating.
The best part
of the book is the way that big parts of it are told by Toby to the Crakers in their
nightly story time. You only hear Toby’s voice; what the Crakers are saying and
doing is implied by her answers. I found their naivety funny and felt sympathy
for Toby’s frustration with their incessant questions. One of the most
surprising things in the book is who became the allies of the God’s Gardeners
in the end.
While it wasn’t
the most satisfying conclusion, it’s still a very good book. It’s a standalone
novel and has a ‘the story so far’ section in the front, but I recommend
reading the first two volumes before this one.
The above is an affiliate link. If you click through it and buy the book, Amazon will give me a few cents.
I was given this book by the Amazon Vine program in return for a fair review. This in no way changed my opinion of the book.
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