Who is MaddAddam? Or, perhaps more to the point, who was MaddAddam? After all, the waterless flood (as the Crakers call it) is so “last year,” and already the kudzu has started to bury all that is left of mankind’s many wonders, not to mention its many failures.
Once the BlyssPluss plague engineered by Crake had run its course, the few survivors peeked out of the rubble of the compounds and the plebelands and began to scratch together a new life in a new world. MaddAddam picks up where The Year of the Flood left off; as a handful of former God’s Gardeners have started a post-apocalyptic commune of sorts at the cobb house in the abandoned parklands. They’ve fortified the grounds to keep liobams (lion-lamb crossbreeds) away from their flock of Mo’Hairs (sheep genetically engineered to grow human hair) and keep the piggoons (super-smart giant pigs modified to grow human body parts) out of the garden. As for the roving painballers – a soft of dehumanized killing machine – they can do little but stand guard.
Our narrator is Toby, who survived the “flood” by riding out the plague in an ANooYoo spa. With her is her lover, Zeb, half-brother of Adam One, founder of God’s Gardeners. Through a series of stories spun for the Crakers (simple, genetically-engineered post-humans), Toby relates Zeb’s biography: hacker, bouncer, thief, and killer of bears; Zeb (in a way, like Forrest Gump) seems to have been at the center of everything: he knew Crake when he was nine-year-old Glenn; was part of the underground anti-authoritarian cabal MaddAddam, and was there when Adam met Eve One.
MaddAddam is also the story of Zeb’s search for his missing brother and the bizarre coalition that formed to rescue him. Toby’s contribution – possible disastrous – to the future of Homo whateverensis is to teach Blackbeard, the young Craker, to read. Heaven help the planet if his people do to it what their creators did…
The third, and perhaps final, novel in Margaret Atwood’s series that began with Oryx and Crake, MaddAddam contains within it everything that made the first two installments special. Atwood, who “burst upon the scene” a generation ago with The Handmaid’s Tale, has long been a voice of warning against technological excess and “progress” for the sake of progress. Her triptych (so far, anyway) of novels is a not-so-thinly veiled caveat for those who would, willy-nilly, alter the genetics of the world about us – Monsanto and ADM included.
| Yet even though genetic engineering is the most obvious technological reason for the death of mankind in Atwood’s series, there are other warnings within the text – all issues that seem to become more pressing daily. Atwood also predicts chaos growing out of the vast and ever-widening gulf between rich and poor and the ever-increasing power of wealthy corporations. In her dystopian future, a handful of massive corporations have appropriated the functions of government; forming what is essentially a police state managed by CorpSeCorps; the corporate security corps. An allegedly free market is a monopoly of a tiny number of corporations who have their tentacles in every business; corporations that think nothing of hiding an addictive chemical in the red sauce at SecretBurger or giving the public a disease with one pill and hiding a different disease in the alleged cure. When a tiny minority owns almost every aspect of production and services, not to mention the enforcement arm, they can pretty much get away with anything they want – and that’s one reason Crake loosed his plague |
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