Maddaddam

I've admired Margaret Atwood's writing for many years. Whether she is writing poetry, literary fiction, literary essays and criticism, social commentary and criticism, plays, or the Massey Lectures, she is always worth while.  I think I've read almost everything she's written in the past few decades, except a few reviews that have appeared in vehicles I don't routinely read. Of her recent works, the two I've most admired and enjoyed are Penelopiad, a retelling of Homer's Odyssey from Penelope's perspective, and Payback, her Massey lectures, which I listened to at least twice from beginning to end, read from cover to cover, and dipped into a few times in search of quotable remarks. As a social critic she is in a class of her own.

She wrote a brilliant dystopic novel, The Handmaid's Tale, about a society afflicted with the deadly blight of religious fascism. Unaccountably this didn't win the Booker Prize, although a later less brilliant novel, The Blind Assassin, did - perhaps because the judges wanted to atone for their earlier oversight.

She has outdone her earlier dystopia in the trilogy that culminates in Maddaddam. These books are set in a world infested with the unintended consequences of meddling with genes and DNA.  Like The Handmaid's Tale, it's the world we live in now, just tweaked a little bit, to demonstrate how close we are to an apocalypse. Oryx and Crake, the first book in the trilogy, was published 10 years ago. It describes the misadventures of Snowman who believes he may be the last human, after everyone else has been killed by a lethal pandemic, the result of another genetic experiment that went horribly wrong. The second book, The Year of the Flood, is set in the same time period. The principal character is Toby, a resourceful woman who survives not only the plague (the waterless flood) that kills almost everyone, but horrific torture by the painballers in a brothel. She escapes, finds refuge in a spa, a derelict rejuvenation clinic, AnooYoo, keeping a lookout for her lover Zeb, keeping at bay with her antique rifle the predatory pigoons (genetically engineered pigs from which organs can be harvested for transplant to humans). Maddaddam is the story of the human and other survivors, a frenetic adventure story, brilliantly told. Predictably it ends sadly.

At a superficial level, disregarding the allegorical elements, all three books are rattling good adventure yarns - Boys' Own Paper stories with f-words. Especially in Maddaddam, there is also a lot of laugh-out-loud humour, courtesy of the gentle, naive Crakers, green eyed genetically engineered handsome but simple folk who have interesting social and biological characteristics, such as males flashing their large penises and peeing in a circle, and both sexes displaying colour changes in their genitals when in rut. Their attempts to understand Toby's stories, their breathtaking simple-mindedness, provide much of the humour. It must be nearly 10 years since I read Oryx and Crake, and 4 or 5 years since I read Year of the Flood. I'd have liked to dip into both to refresh my memory but both books disappeared long ago into the black hole of Rebecca's book shelves. Anyway it isn't necessary because Maddaddam opens with a synopsis of both, considerately provided by Margaret Atwood at the beginning of this final book in the trilogy. The synopsis is considerably more convoluted and complex than my simple summary above, which omits a lot of important detail.

Collectively the three novels in this trilogy are very impressive, portraying a dystopia as chilling as George Orwell's 1984, but much richer, more complex, its imaginative sweep exceeding all other dystopias I can recall. 

As I look over Margaret Atwood's extremely impressive output I'm gratified to see how the judges of prestigious literary awards have recognized her talent. I think she is well and truly worthy of the most prestigious of all literary awards. I hope the Nobel committee has her works in front of them next time they are deliberating.

September song

If I must have an ear worm I couldn't ask for a better one than Kurt Weil's September Song. With  a lovely melody and amorous sentiments including regret, its theme is the relentless inevitability of passing time. This tune ran through my mind for several hours yesterday as I reflected on the significance of yet another birthday. The sun came out intermittently after the previous day's drenching rain, and the first autumn colours have appeared. I can see scarlet leaves and gold ones in the trees below my windows

Before lunch, David drove me to an up-market store that specializes in top quality recliners. I squandered more of my children's inheritance on a splendid Norwegian-made recliner where I can sit or  lie and read or watch TV. It will be an incentive to move from the comfortable chair in front of my desktop iMac to the greater comfort of the recliner where I'll be able to stretch out, put my swollen feet up and read, listen to music, or even if all else fails, watch TV or a DVD.

The family came here for lunch and for once I remembered to get out my camera. David also took a few photos with his iPhone, which seems able to do everything except boil eggs and darn socks.

An untimely interruption

Wendy and I discovered during our year in London in 1961-62 that we woke each morning an hour or two before our children. If we wanted quality time to ourselves without interruptions or distractions, those early morning hours were our best bet, better than evenings when one or both children often had demands that kept us hopping until it was our own bed time.. This hour or two of freedom from kiddies was especially welcome at weekends when I didn't have to get up and away to start my day at the Social Medicine Research Unit.

Early on a summer Sunday morning Wendy and I were frolicking on our king-size bed, happily expressing our mutual affection. It was hot so we had discarded our bed clothes, nightgown and pyjamas. The technical name for our enjoyable activity is foreplay and it was absorbing our undivided attention. We may have been whispering or murmuring sweet nothings to each other but our bedroom was quiet until suddenly the silence was broken by the outraged loud voice of Rebecca, demanding to know, "What's Mummy doing to Daddy?"

There behind us were our two toddlers, hand in hand as they often were, gazing with wide open eyes at their embarrassed parents. Hastily we pulled a sheet over us and swept under a pillow the devices we used in those pre-Pill years to minimize the risk of further additions to our little family. Wendy donned a robe to render herself respectable and escorted our two little spoil-sports back to their own bedroom.

Years later I asked both Rebecca and David if they remembered that morning. David was too young to have started laying down memories and Rebecca was on the cusp, does have some fragmentary memories of that wonderful year, but has no recollection of that embarrassing morning, embarrassing to us anyway. Probably it's just as well that she doesn't remember it. That episode could have left scars on her psyche - or given her ideas long before she was able to put them into practice. Rebecca's question that Sunday morning doesn't qualify as a cute saying but it's one early childhood remark we never forgot.

Another new year

For more than 40 years the Labour Day long weekend has been the watershed event in my calendar, marking the start of a new academic year. In the early 1970s I fell into the habit of using this weekend to review the events of the past year and draw up a list of priorities for the new academic year that began on the first Tuesday after the Monday Labour Day holiday. The highest priorities were my academic responsibilities - teaching commitments, curriculum review and revision, marshalling other members of the teaching team into a coherent group in which each knew what everyone else was doing. The second tier priorities were the research domain, which included my role as principal investigator, team member in multi centre studies, peer reviewer of research proposals, author of articles reporting results of research. As the years passed my role as author and editor of books evolved from a third tier of priorities to take first place, consuming the largest proportion of my waking hours, pushing other intellectual activities lower down in my personal scheme of things. 

The shift in priorities began on Bastille Day 1977 in New York City, that steamy hot day of a massive power outage, when I accepted the role as editor in chief of the massive American reference textbook of public health and preventive medicine, and set about transforming it from what it had been to what it is now. I am pleased and proud that this huge book is now known as Maxcy-Rosenau-Last, after its first and second editors - and me. But my role and involvement ended when the 15th edition was published in 2007. 

John Last and some of the books he's edited or written; the 11th edition
of the big public health textbook is by his right arm

I'm more proud and pleased about my role as compiler and editor of the Dictionary of Epidemiology that took over my life from the early 1980s until 2001 when I handed it over to Miquel Porta in Barcelona (I've stayed on as an associate editor of the 5th and 6th editions). Last time I counted this dictionary had been translated into 15 languages; it's used by epidemiologists all over the world, and at meetings of the IEA  (International Epidemiological Association) as I've said before, I feel a bit like the Eiffel Tower because so many of them  want to be photographed standing next to me. The 6th edition is to be published in 2014 and I expect that my role will come to an end.

John Last with the two dictionaries, at APHA meeting,
Boston 2006

So this Labour Day weekend, like last year's, finds me with a much abbreviated list of priorities. At the beginning of this calendar year I set myself the modest task of licking my memoirs into shape by the end of the year. As readers of this blog know, I've been posting abridged excerpts of my memoirs. I'll probably continue to do this, but my blog is a convenient place to ventilate about whatever happens to be on my mind at a time when I feel like sharing thoughts with the amorphous assortment of blog readers - including those inscrutable Latvians who haven't told me why they hit on my blog.