MaddAddam

After the Flood

The survivors are assembling. Toby and Ren from the God’s Gardeners, Jimmy (Snowman) from the Paradice Project, a group of former MaddAddamites — the bioterrorists who were Crake’s fellow students — and the Crakers: Crake’s engineered post-humans, who lack the capacity for violence but are filled with curiosity and an urgent need for stories about where they came from and who they are.

MaddAddam is the novel in which the theoretical question from Oryx and Crake — what would it look like if you started human society again, without the parts that cause wars and hierarchies and ecological destruction? — becomes a practical, lived question. The Crakers are sweet, strange, and limited in ways Crake probably did not intend. The human survivors are damaged, resourceful, and not entirely sure they welcome the company.

The Storyteller

Toby becomes the community’s storyteller — the one who answers the Crakers’ questions about the old world and about Crake and Oryx. Her task mirrors Atwood’s: how do you transmit the truth about a destroyed civilisation to people who have never lived in it, in a form they can use? The novel’s answer is that you tell stories, even imperfect ones, and you trust that the stories will carry what is essential.

MaddAddam ends the trilogy with both genuine hope and genuine loss, which is the only ending that would have been honest.

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set MaddAddam apart: The Crakers, Crake’s genetically engineered humans, become genuinely interesting and moving characters in their own right; Toby’s role as storyteller to the Crakers mirrors the novel’s own argument about the necessity of fiction; and The combination of dark comedy and genuine pathos is Atwood at her best. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of MaddAddam give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Stories are how communities transmit what they believe is true about the world — and therefore how they constitute themselves as communities. What seems like a joke (Crake’s engineered humans without the capacity for racism or war) becomes something stranger and more serious when it is real. Every survivor of catastrophe has to decide what to preserve and what to let go — both decisions have consequences. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Writing

Margaret Atwood’s prose in MaddAddam is the vehicle through which the book’s ideas travel. The style is calibrated to the subject — neither more ornate nor more stripped-down than the material requires. This kind of precision is less common than it appears, and it is one of the reasons the book repays re-reading: there is more in each page than a single pass recovers.

Limitations

Requires having read both Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood to carry its full weight. Some of the action sequences feel more conventional than the trilogy’s best passages. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Readers who have completed Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood concluding the MaddAddam Trilogy.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — A complete and emotionally generous conclusion to the MaddAddam Trilogy: dark, funny, and surprisingly moving about the Crakers.

Reading Guides

• Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood — Full Review
• The Year of the Flood — Full Review

The Third MaddAddam Novel

MaddAddam was published in 2013 as the third and final novel in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, completing the narrative arc begun in Oryx and Crake (2003) and continued in The Year of the Flood (2009). The trilogy depicts a near-future world in which a plague engineered by the geneticist Crake has destroyed most of human civilisation, leaving behind a small group of survivors — the God’s Gardeners and the employees of a corporate compound — and the Crakers, the genetically engineered humanoids Crake designed as humanity’s replacements. MaddAddam resolves the storylines of both predecessor novels by bringing together characters from each into the same narrative timeline.

Completing the Trilogy

The structure of the trilogy is formally interesting: Oryx and Crake tells the same historical period as The Year of the Flood from different points of view, and MaddAddam shows what happens after both sets of survivors converge. Atwood’s trilogy has been classified variously as science fiction, speculative fiction, and dystopian fiction — a question of genre taxonomy that she engaged with repeatedly in interviews, distinguishing between science fiction (which she defined as involving things not currently possible) and speculative fiction (which extrapolates from current trends). The trilogy draws extensively on real developments in genetic engineering, synthetic biology, and corporate environmental destruction: the CorpSeCorps, the Compounds, and the genetically engineered animals — liobams, rakunks — are extrapolations from research that was already underway at the time of writing.

Trilogy Completion

MaddAddam (2013) is the third volume of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy, completing the narrative begun in Oryx and Crake (2003) and extended in The Year of the Flood (2009). The three novels cover the same period from different perspectives: Oryx and Crake from Snowman/Jimmy’s point of view; The Year of the Flood from the women’s community; MaddAddam from the survivors’ collective. Together they constitute Atwood’s most sustained engagement with genetic engineering, corporate power, and environmental catastrophe.