MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood (Bloomsbury)
Not since the Cold War has the end of the world been so chic. We all need something to take our minds off antibiotic-resistant bacteria, global warming and bioterrorism, after all. This Is the End, World’s End, Pacific Rim and World War Z clog up the cinema listings and the execrable The Walking Dead is – inexplicably – a TV hit. But just when you think you are suffering from apocalypse fatigue, along comes Margaret Atwood to wipe the floor with the limp, lame competition and inject new life into the genre.
MaddAddam is the third in her dystopian trilogy that also includes Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood and, like those two, it is a work of posh sci-fi (or “speculative fiction”) that does not include “any technologies or biobeings that do not already exist, are not under construction, or are not possible in theory.”
To give an overview, the boy-wonder-turned-mad-scientist Crake had been dividing his time between secretly concocting a horrific plague to wipe out humanity that he inserted into BlyssPlus pills, a type of birth control that enhanced sexual pleasure, and creating the Crakers, bland, beautiful “gene-spliced quasi-humans” who would live on after the virus had spread. They have been engineered to be mild-mannered, eat leaves, not require clothes and mate seasonally so as not to cause sexual jealousy, all things that Crake thought would reduce human misery.
MaddAddam takes place after this “waterless flood” has wiped out most of the world’s population. Conveniently, almost all of the people who have survived knew each other before and they are now attempting to build a community while avoiding the Painballers, former prisoners who engaged in televised Hunger Games-style battles to the death. Naturally, the latter became somewhat coarsened by this and now spend their time raping, disembowelling and generally being ne’er-do-wells.
When a group of Painballers take Adam One (leader of the God’s Gardeners, a green, pacifist religious sect that acted as a resistance to the Corps) hostage, the community teams up with the Pigoons, clever, genetically modified pigs with organs for transplantation and “human pre-frontal cortex tissue in their brains”, to rescue him.
The story also takes the form of Toby telling the Crakers about the life of her lover Zeb, an accomplished computer hacker. Zeb and Adam One grew up together under the iron fist of the sadistic Rev, who created his own cult named the Church of PetrOleum because “that was the way to go in those days if you wanted to coin the megabucks” but lacked other skills such as “derivative trading”. The religious satire that Atwood trained on the silly but endearing God’s Gardener’s in YotF has become distinctly more acidic here. PetrOleum’s theology is that God mandates burning fossil fuels and its propaganda includes slogans like “Serial Killers Believe in Global Warming”. Eventually, Zeb and Adam One expose the Rev for murder, drain his bank account and run away to join the resistance to the elite Corporations that controlled society pre-pandemic.
As pacey as the plot is, though, the main function of a dystopia is to comment on present-day society. It doesn’t take too much pondering to work out who is in Atwood’s crosshairs when she observes that Corp executives “wearing the most casual clothing would most likely be the alphas” or that most state functions have been outsourced to a private security firm, CorpSeCorps. Indeed, Atwood’s archness and attention to detail makes this world believable despite the rather implausible overarching narrative.
The only fly in the ointment is that some of the minor characters appear vapid and under-developed. And while Zeb rises above the stock good-at-heart rebel he initially appeared to be, I was disappointed that the enigmatic Adam One was not fleshed out more.
That said, MaddAddam provides further proof, if any were needed, that Atwood is one of the world’s finest and funniest living writers. This is a brilliantly realised, needle-sharp and imaginative novel. What more could you want?
