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.