Margaret Atwood's MADDADDAM

As my readers are aware, I've had decidedly mixed reactions to Margaret Atwood's idiocratic MaddAddam trilogy so far, and I was annoyed enough with the second volume to be at best lukewarm about taking up the third, MaddAddam.

But then I got my hands on the audiobook (bit of a mistake, although with the importance the oral storytelling tradition plays in this series, an audiobook version seemed like a naturally good fit, except, well, the narrators. Oh, the narrators*) and decided this would be good enough for pre-sleepytime ingestion and finally gave it a go.

But so I... I don't know where to begin with this one. Atwood has been crippling what should be a fascinating double-dystopia with soap opera melodrama from the start, but in this closing volume... well, it's almost all soap opera, right down to a major character spending most of the narrative unconscious/comatose. Yep. Oh, and the badass heroine of the prior novel, Toby, gets all her teeth pulled and instead of being smart and resourceful and tough, spends most of her time simmering with jealousy of the younger, prettier women whom she suspects of having designs on her man (who is admittedly a bit of a tomcat but whatever). Seriously. Did I miss a bodysnatching?

So yeah, I mostly wound up just glad it was over. It didn't help that the audio book featured two very annoying narrators, but even had I been reading the text myself I'm pretty sure I'd have felt that way.

I will say this, though: The narrative voices are distinct and masterful, the world-building is still great, and all of the narrative threads were pulled tight. Atwood is a total pro.

Just, someone take her TV away during the daylight hours? Please? Because DAMN.

*The narrators seriously drove me nuts on this one. Narrators, plural, because there is a female narrator for the Toby-centric bits (which also include most of the Crakker dialogue), and a male for Toby's boyfriend Zeb's bits-as-told-to-Toby. The female sounds like she's voicing cartoon characters most of the time (but especially so when she has Crakker dialogue); the male is an annoying cross between Dramatic Action Movie Trailer Guy and William Shatner, though he is funny on the songs. There is a third male narrator voicing a whole new character in the last few chapters of the books that's just fine, though. Why not just let him tell the whole story? Certainly it would also have made the production a lot less gimmicky, as well.

Margaret Atwood's THE YEAR OF THE FLOOD

Not so much a sequel as a side-quel to Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood is one of those books that kind of makes me incoherent when someone asks me whether I liked it or not. Kind of like the first book did.

I can understand certain conceits and compulsions in post-apocalyptic fiction. One is telling the story, generally, of the survivors, so the focus is going to be on those survivors, on their lives before Disaster X, on how they survived it and what they do afterwards. And there aren't a lot of ways to do this; most post-apocalyptic fiction goes one of two ways: it either focuses on a group who knew each other before and survived and continue to survive by sticking together, or it tells individual, disparate stories up until the different characters meet and band together -- if they band together -- either during or after Disaster X. To do anything else risks my eye-rolling at its implausibility.

Guess which route Margaret Atwood has taken here?

Well, I've done a lot of eye-rolling.

For the MaddAddam books, Atwood has chosen to go a third way, that of improbably Dickensian coincidence, which, when coupled with overlapping love triangles, makes for a lot of narrative annoyance for this reader. For all The Year of the Flood's leaping about in time, a device that propelled me through Oryx and Crake very satisfyingly as narrative questions kept getting posed and answered all the time, slowly and judiciously, its cleverness is overshadowed by what felt to me like a rookie-caliber blunder, as far as maintaining my willing suspension of disbelief goes.

The Year of the Flood's characters come together -- indeed mostly start out together -- years before the human-engineered pandemic plague created by Crake in the first novel. They are all God's Gardeners, a hippie-ish eco-Catholic cult of sorts*, heavy on the homegrown/DIY ethos, vegan, venerating their own calendar of saints that includes figures like Dian Fossey and Stephen Jay Gould and Euell Gibbons who taught the sort of whole earth/we're all one doctrine that shames bathing and washing too often (waste of water), throwing things away (waste of everything), stepping on beetles, etc. Their leader, Adam One, warns of a coming "Waterless Flood" that will wipe out all human life, waterless because God promised Noah he'd not do that kind of thing again but may have crossed His fingers a bit, and the need to prepare and preserve against it. So, as a group of survivors go, so far, so plausible.

But of course God's Gardeners have enemies, both of the big, soulless corporate and of the nasty, brutish and personal sort, and the group's downfall predates the actual Waterless Flood (the plague) by a good span of time, so everybody gets separated and winds up having to weather the waterless tides as best they can. Which they all do. And this is not much of a spoiler, because all of this novel's jumping around in narrative time pretty much gives that away early on.

So far this stretches but does not break the bounds of plausibility, for me. But then, and again, this is not much of a spoiler, they all find each other again! Amid giant world-wide catastrophe, amid forces that have already pulled them all pretty far apart (one character winds up half a continent away with the plague hits, but still, yep, winds up back in everybody's orbit), and despite the fact that pretty much all of their preparations** were for naught and a bunch of chance miracles were what actually saved them (eye rolling), the heavy hand of fate shoves them all back together again. And again. And again.

But at least Atwood didn't pull a Stephen King and send her characters a bunch of dream prompts and whatnot to make them dance to her tune. For which I am grateful.

But you know what? I read this pretty much compulsively and non-stop, mostly in one long go, despite the eye-rolling. This is mostly because of the world-building, which is still top-notch. Atwood's double-dystopia, as I discussed when I read Oryx and Crake, is as plausible and chilling as her plot is ridiculous, a fascinating wasteland of abandoned Idiocracy-flavored  franchise business complexes, decaying gated communities and fabulous gene-engineered mutant animals and plants. Bunnies that glow green. Half-lion, half-lamb hybrids. Big, beautiful moths developed to eat kudzu but fonder of garden vegetables. Vicious, intelligent pigs. Sheep that grow long, flowing manes of lush human hair in a rainbow of vibrant colors. And somewhere, only hinted at in this novel, there are still the Crakers, the gentle, sexy, pellet-pooping human replacement species created in the previous novel. Atwood has one hell of an imagination, and she let it run wild. But only on the world building.

The final volume of this trilogy, MaddAddam, has just been released. I was really looking forward to it, even though I'd yet to read this second volume until just now. But now? My eagerness is diminished. I'm sure I'll get hold of it and read it sometime, because even with the stale soap opera taste (overlapping love triangles, eww!) The Year of the Flood left in my mouth, it was still loads better than most of the dreck out there, and that's a rarity.

But for now, other volumes beckon. And other tasks. It's autumn, and I've quite a harvest to preserve; I've discovered canning. And I do prefer my food to actually be food. I'd make an okay God's Gardener, actually. I'd just be one of those who tapped my foot through all the rituals and prayers and hymn singing. And I'd probably miss showering kind of a lot.

*Which, ware hokiness (oh, the hymns!) and ware preachiness as well. These are exactly the kind of super-earnest passive-aggressive college hippies you thought you left behind in college. The ones who are basically right about a lot of things, and whose practices you are probably actually following more than not, but who just won't shut up about them. The ones who want to lecture you about the importance of recycling even as you're trundling your recycling container to the curb for pickup. Because really, if you actually cared about the earth, you'd put all those cans and bottles and pieces of junk mail on a trailer and hitch it to your bamboo-built bicycle and pedal the eight miles to the recycling center yourself, and then stay to lecture the staff there about how they really should be using wind and solar power to process the stuff, dude.

**Yes, they made Mormon hoard-type stashes of food and scattered them around in places, but really, they hid them so well that nobody else found them? Nobody? Or are we really just supposed to believe that our little band really were the only survivors in the whole wide world after the plague, which Crake hid in a sex pill? Because only this tiny, tiny band of eco-hippie cultists would eschew a sex pill. Riiiiiiiiiight.

Margaret Atwood's ORYX AND CRAKE #OneBookAtATime

Idiocracy meets Twelve Monkeys meets The Elementary Particles. That would be my elevator pitch for Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood's bleakly lovely double-dystopia.

Double dystopia? Why, yes, for Atwood is nothing if not economical as she spins out a dual narrative of the life and times of one Jimmy, later known as Snowman, the last known surviving member of the species Homo sapiens sapiens. From the reader's perspective, Jimmy merely exchanges one dystopia for another; the world he remembers and regrets is a corporatist nightmare in which each suburb is a wholly-owned corporate "Compound" -- a gated community with fierce, even lethal security, private education, private everything -- and the rest of the world, the cities and the rural areas, are simply "pleebland", where the ignorant customers live as best they can. One can easily picture those pleeblanders lining up in the morning for their gentleman's latte, but of course we never get to see them until the very end of Oryx and Crake. They are merely faceless victims of the Crakepocalypse.

Crake (just a code-name, after an extinct-in-the-novel/rare-in-real-life Australian bird*) is Jimmy's best friend, a misanthropic scientific genius who rises to be king of the lab even as Jimmy, not so numerate, not so scientific, sinks to a job in the PR industry, the last refuge of the liberal arts being the writing of copy to advertise the products of the Compounds' geniuses. The story of their friendship is a little bland, but that's part of the point; Jimmy's and Crake's world does not value human connection, and so the pair grow up barely knowing what it is, until Oryx comes along relatively late in the narrative. Oryx is a beautiful, possibly Asian, girl, a survivor of various sex trade horrors, whom Crake more or less rescues from his life and puts to work as a teacher for his very special creation: nothing more and nothing less than a replacement for human beings.

The post-apocalyptic narrative zeroes in on these replacements as observed by Jimmy (the Compound life is told in flashbacks), the only ordinary human left alive that anyone knows of, who has let himself be manipulated into serving as guardian and caretaker of the "Crakers", a new species of human that eats like rabbits, lives for exactly 30 like Edenic noble savages straight out of Rousseau, mates like baboons, and has been taught, mostly by Jimmy, whom they call Snowman though none of them has ever seen snow, to revere Crake as their creator and Oryx as the goddess of all animal and plant life.

As a relatively simple but still-tense (the Crakers aren't the only genetically engineered new species amuck in the world, after all. There be monsters in their paradise) supply-run plot unfolds and sends Jimmy traipsing through the world of the Talking Heads' "Nothing But Flowers" back to the remains of the Compound from which the Crakers came, Jimmy/Snowman's flashbacks tell us how the Crakers came to be the new dominant species -- and it ain't pretty. For Crake was all but a supervillain, so angry at humanity for what it had done to the world that he hatched and implemented a truly sinister plot against it. Yes, this apocalypse is all the deliberate work of one man, whose girlfriend and best friend were too busy getting it on behind his back to notice what he was up to until it was too late.

Romantic sort of subplot aside, if you're a reader who needs strong characters to get you through a story, this might be tough going for you. Jimmy is a stock hero-victim of a kind Atwood uses a lot -- her point of view characters tend to the passive, the disbelieving, the innocent only because deliberately ignorant. Crake is similarly one-dimensional, and as for Oryx, she is barely there, and when she is, she is elusive to the point of annoyance. But what is lacked in character is made up for in other ways; Atwood manages (in, as ever, delicately glorious prose) to keep the faceless billions who stand to suffer if/when Crake succeeds ever in the reader's thoughts, and her main trio's bland opacity gives the story the feeling of archetype and mythology, as if we, too, are getting the filtered and sanitized and misremembered version of events the Crakers might have, if Jimmy had been more honest and deliberate with them. There is, perhaps, a wry commentary on the importance of the liberal arts buried here, as Jimmy gets the last laugh, to a degree. It's a pity that by novel's end, one wants to slap him.

This looks to be at least a trilogy before Atwood is done. I have The Year of the Flood on deck for a future read, and a third MaddAddam book is due out this fall. I'm in.

*This novel is very big on extinction, here treated via a videogame released by an entity calling itself "MaddAddam" that is pretty much an early rehearsal of what Crake is going to do to the world.