My Atwood Project, Part 11: The MaddAddam Trilogy

 (Just a reminder that these blog entries do not purport to be thorough analyses or even proper reviews. They are just my musings upon re-reading Margaret Atwood’s fiction after reading her memoir.) 

I again broke the rule of chronology by re-reading the MaddAddam trilogy together, though the three novels were spaced apart thusly: Oryx and Crake was published in 2003; The Year of the Flood in 2009; and MaddAddam in 2013. Still, nothing like the 34 years separating The Handmaid’s Tale from The Testaments. And, as she did in those two books, Atwood again takes pains to remind us that her fiction is based on events and ideas from the real world. 

Origin: Atwood began the book on a worldwide trip that started in Australia, after an observation that the Aborigines never changed because they had everything they needed. So could we use gene modifications to change what we need? She also chose to tell the first novel from a mainly male point of view, after being asked many times why she “always” wrote about women. 

Title characters: Oryx and Crake is named for two would-be architects of a new world. Crake, once known as Glenn, is a gene-splicing genius who wants to create the ideal human: immune to war and overpopulation, among other improvements borrowed from existing species. Oryx is Crake’s lover and accomplice, and the center of a love triangle with Crake’s comparatively dimmer friend, Jimmy. 

Plot: The book begins at what seems like the end of the world. Jimmy, now calling himself Snowman, thinks he may well be the last human, or at least the last Human, version 1.0. The only other…people he’s aware of are Crake’s creations, Humans 2.0, whom he calls Crakers. They have no possessions, not even clothes; they eat leaves, so they don’t have herds or crops or territory; and they only have sex when the female is in “season” -- once every three years. 

AS USUAL: SPOILERS AHEAD!!

We learn that as Crake was developing his new race, he was also sending Oryx around the world to give out samples of a fun new drug, BlyssPluss. What we don’t learn until much later is that Oryx was also spreading a plague engineered to destroy the OG humans and clear the playing field for the new team. Crake and Oryx die together, and Jimmy is left holding the bag…of new people. 

The world building is good and thorough, but not entirely original. The Corporations and their live-in campuses are strongly reminiscent of Neal Stephenson’s Enclaves, which appear in several of his novels, such as Snow Crash (1992) and The Diamond Age (1995). The idea is that corporations will need to secure themselves and their employees from headhunting and secret-stealing, so gated communities evolve into their own self-sufficient mini-cities. 

The spread of an engineered virus to wipe out humanity harkens back to the movie “12 Monkeys” (1995), though I’m sure it’s appeared elsewhere. 

Predictions: Atwood foresaw technology being used in many ways that it is being used today, such as “digital genalteration” (deep fakes). However, she has college kids staying in touch via email, not knowing about texting yet. It will show up in the other two books. 

Parallels: Atwood’s favorite plot devices, love triangles and abandoning parents, make their appearances here. Jimmy sees the mother who abandoned him for her ethical beliefs on a TV news segment, much as Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale saw her mother in a documentary about a pro-choice rally, during her re-education. 

While the first novel sets up the end of one race and the birth of another, from the point of view primarily of the scientists and corporate employees, The Year of the Flood takes place for the most part in the “pleeblands,” where everyone who is not part of a Corporation lives. Here we meet my favorite characters, Toby and Zeb, who are important members of God’s Gardeners, an eco-religious group preparing for the “Waterless Flood.” 

The God’s Gardeners seem oddly prescient regarding the coming plague, until we understand that they have become a haven for apostates from the Corporations. Toby, though, is just an ordinary pleebrat, rescued from an abusive boss. Zeb, on the other hand, has an extremely interesting past (magician’s assistant! eater of a bear!), which is recounted in great detail in MaddAddam. 

When the plague hits, Toby is in hiding from that abusive boss again, and is able to quarantine safely: much of The Year of the Flood takes place in the AnooYoo spa (I love Atwood’s brand names), where Toby is holed up eating things like Lemon Meringue Facial. Another important character is Ren, who was already in quarantine in the strip club where she works, Scales and Tails, due to a torn “biofilm.” 

In MaddAddam, pleebs and scientists must work together. They discover that the scientists that Crake “recruited” to create his perfect humans were actually “scooped” against their will. We get Zeb’s amazing backstory, and the genesis (haha) of God’s Gardeners. It is the least satisfying book to me, though, because the big plot points are past and this third part feels like tying up loose ends. 

However, I love the series as a whole, especially the first two books. They tackle the big questions: what does it mean to be human? How would you re-design humanity, if you had the chance? And finally, will Crakers and OG humans be able to hybridize? I can’t spoil that one for you, because it’s left unclear…perhaps a fourth book is in order, Ms Atwood? 

My Atwood Project, Part 5: The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments

I’ve read Atwood’s most famous novel several times. I can’t remember the first, but it made such an impression on me that I insisted on teaching it in a novel-reading elective at an Episcopalian school in the early 2000s. What better place? Show young people from religious families the unethical lengths to which religion can be pushed. Then I reread it at least once again, before the long-awaited sequel The Testaments came out, in 2019. 

I view The Handmaid’s Tale as a breakout for Atwood because of her world-building. The previous novels, set in contemporary times, focused on characters, primarily women, and their relationships, primarily to men. The cities fade into the background. Here, Handmaid Offred is a rat in a maze, so the maze becomes very important. Where are the exits? Where are the traps? This novel takes on an extra dimension as the new rules of the new society render the protagonist’s every interaction fraught. We see this world-building again most clearly in the speculative MaddAdam series, but also in her Booker Prize-winning Blind Assassin. In all of these, Atwood steps out of the genre of “women’s fiction” and incorporates the influence of the comic books and pulp novels she and her brother read as children. This hybridization makes these novels truly original. 

Another element that struck me this time through was the transactionality: in a society based on removal of choice, very little can be freely given, but there is a lot of trade. The Commander’s Wife, Serena Joy, tells Offred from the outset that she views their relationship as a “business transaction.” Offred sees in small infractions of the rules the hopeful existence of a black market and opportunities for trade. When the Commander summons her for an off-the-script meeting, she immediately wonders both what he wants, and what she can get. This tit-for-tat mentality is strongly tied to the strict pecking order. Everyone’s status is obvious thanks to their prescribed clothing color, which reminded me of Brave New World. Seeing everyone’s value at a glance is also so helpful in maintaining order. 

[Spoilers! Beware!]

Another motif that I noticed was how haunted Offred is by the suicide of her predecessor, and how strongly her own will to live prevails, driving her to have an affair with chauffeur Nick despite the danger involved. 

I realized at the end that my perception of the book’s ending had been clouded by the 1990 movie adaptation, in which Offred kills the Commander before escaping to a trailer in parts unknown to record her memoir. The novel actually ends with Offred simply being picked up by a black van, for unclear reasons, urged on by her lover Nick, who assures her it’s safe. We can assume the van was operated by the Mayday resistance, as Nick said, not the all-seeing Eyes, because the next chapter takes the form of an academic conference examining the memoir which Offred must have written outside of Gilead. 

This frame story element returns in The Testaments, which consists of the confessions of Aunt Lydia, and of Offred’s two children, one liberated with her and raised in Canada, the other raised in Gilead. I’m deviating from the chronological aspect of my project here, because these two books came out over 30 years apart, but I could not resist reading them "in order” again. 

When I first read The Testaments, I was not thrilled with the idea that Aunt Lydia was a secret rebel (click link for my first review). How could she have filled her role so convincingly, when she never truly believed? How could she lie so low, so long? It seemed like a cop out to redeem someone who seemed such a total villain.

This second time, though, I paid closer attention to Aunt Lydia’s backstory, as a judge, an ambitious single woman who was given the opportunity to pursue that ambition right to the top of a new society. She had the patience and cunning to wait to bring the whole of Gilead down, rather than ruin her chance too early in a weak, partial rebellion. I am more willing to buy into Aunt Lydia’s character now. 

And I am still convinced of the plausibility of Gilead. It is far too easy to imagine those with the “they’re gonna take our guns” mentality turning those guns on others. Atwood takes great pains at the end of The Testaments to show the archives of articles she collected in researching the first book: everything she wrote, including the crazed “Particicution,” was based in reality. Let it not become so.