In What Order Should I Read the Maddadam Series
Final Showdown
"Where, where is the town?" Talking Heads sang. "Now, it's null merely flowers."
What a joy it is to see Margaret Atwood taking such delicious pleasure in the end of the globe. 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 earth came to be, and how the characters made their way to this boxing for the hereafter of humanity. Atwood has brought the previous ii books together in a plumbing fixtures and joyous conclusion that's an epic not only of an imagined hereafter but of our ain by, an exposition of how oral storytelling traditions led to written ones and ultimately to our sense of origin.
Speaking virtually the last volume of this trilogy is like discussing only the middle console of Hieronymus Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights." While there's enough detail, both beautiful and grotesque, to appoint a reader, information technology's very much part of a whole. The book begins with four pages of catch-upwardly for those who demand it, but since the treat of reading both previous novels lay in the gradual understanding of the world Atwood created, and because the terminal volume contains such lush satisfactions of narrative and invention, it would be a shame non to have that full feel.
The mode of "MaddAddam" is oral history, used intermittently as Toby, one of the female survivors of "The Yr of the Alluvion," tries to explain the origin of things to the Children of Crake, who appeared in the first pages of the serial'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 mail service-apocalyptic worlds, these are Garden of Eden creatures, naked and childlike, though capable of tremendous sexual freedom, and the few humans left live empathise that the globe, such equally it is, volition exist left to them. Luminous-eyed, vegetarian, copulating merrily, they heed to Toby'due south stories as gospel. And notwithstanding she's inventing as she goes along. Equally she tells them (and us) tales of the humans we accept met and their journeys to this chemical compound, she simplifies and glorifies them. She makes gods of men and Edens of laboratories; she makes sense from what nosotros know was anarchy. And, gradually, we realize that this is how we ourselves empathise our own world.
The main story Toby tells is that of Zeb, now her lover in the guarded compound, a man nosotros first met in "The Year of the Flood" equally a rough new arrival to the God'south Gardeners, an earthly tribe in former days, preparing for the Waterless Alluvion. That book's organisation every bit a hymnal praising the saints of natural science is fantabulous training for the biblical tone of Toby'south tale. Zeb came into that volume equally a mystery, and here we learn of his childhood upbringing by the Rev of the Church building of PetrOleum (a close relative of today's prosperity gospel) and his eventual escape into a life on the run, showtime to San Francisco's "pleeblands," then to a task as a magician's assistant, to survival in the Canadian wilderness afterward 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 move.
Prototype 
Like its predecessors, "MaddAddam" is as much a story of adolescent longing and disappointment as it is of life earlier and afterwards the Waterless Inundation. 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 pocket-sized hurts and jealousies of its survivors. Toby's telling of Zeb's story is interspersed with the present-twenty-four hour period defense of the compound, and it mirrors her own insecurities virtually her lover. When she asks about a adult female he once knew, he'southward silent. "Will this be a painful story?" she asks herself. "It'due south likely: nearly stories about the past have an element of pain in them, now that the past has been ruptured so violently, so irreparably." So she adds: "But not, surely, for the get-go time in homo 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 virtually bleating helplessly. Green glowing rabbits hop in the underbrush, chased past owls. Toby'southward storytelling contains her clearly irritated responses to the unheard comments of the Children of Crake. "Thank y'all 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 incessantly bidding her "good night," she finally says, "That'south enough. You lot can stop," followed past an wearied: "Thank you."
Atwood'southward prose miraculously balances humor, outrage and dazzler. A simple clarification becomes both spooky and sublime: "They set out the side by side morning merely at sunrise. The vultures that superlative the taller, deader copse are spreading their black wings so the dew on them will evaporate; they're waiting for the thermals to aid them lift and spiral. Crows are passing the rumors, one rough syllable at a fourth dimension. The smaller birds are stirring, beginning to cheep and trill; pink deject filaments float above the eastern horizon, brightening to gilded at the lower edges." In so much genre fiction, language is sacrificed to plot and invention. Information technology's a pleasure to read a futuristic novel whose celebration of beauty extends to the words themselves. And words are very important hither; by the moving cease of "MaddAddam," we understand how language and writing produced the beautiful fiction that described our beginnings.
Atwood'due south future may take $.25 of brightness, but our present does not. Equally she states in her acknowledgments, "Although 'MaddAddam' is a work of fiction, information technology does not include any technologies or bio-beings that exercise not already exist, are not under construction or are non possible in theory." The setting is our ain 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 heart. Toby imagines the creator's thoughts earlier the finish: "The people in the anarchy cannot larn. They cannot sympathize what they are doing to the sea and the sky and the plants and the animals. They cannot empathize that they are killing them, and that they will end past killing themselves. . . . So at that place is merely one affair left to do."
"I thought that we'd beginning over," sang Talking Heads, "simply I guess I was wrong." Wrong indeed. This finale to Atwood'south ingenious trilogy lights a burn down from the fears of our age, then douses information technology with promise for the planet'due south survival. But that survival may not include us.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/books/review/maddaddam-by-margaret-atwood.html
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