MaddAddam: part 3 of The Maddaddam Trilogy, by Margaret Atwood, reviewed

By Simon Cocking, review of MaddAddam: part 3 of The Maddaddam Trilogy, by Margaret Atwood. Available from Virago here. 

By the author of The Handmaid’s Tale and Alias Grace

Toby, a survivor of the man-made plague that has swept the earth, is telling stories.

Stories left over from the old world, and stories that will determine a new one.

Listening hard is young Blackbeard, one of the innocent Crakers, the species designed to replace humanity. Their reluctant prophet, Jimmy-the-Snowman, is in a coma, so they’ve chosen a new hero – Zeb, the street-smart man Toby loves. As clever Pigoons attack their fragile garden and malevolent Painballers scheme, the small band of survivors will need more than stories.

MaddAddam reviewed

This is the concluding book in the Maddaddam trilogy by Margaret Atwood, published in 2013. As a whole, written from 2003, to 2009, to the concluding book, they remain prescient and impressively relevant for this current times of upheaval in 2020. Environmental issues, yes, genetic manipulation with dubious ethical actions, yes, corporates unchecked and acting in uncontrolled ways, yes.

Maddaddam in some ways feels like an attempt to join up the loose ends and uncompleted stories from the first two books. When this is done too zealously, think of the endless reworking of the Star Wars movies to remedy unresolved issues, it can detract from the joy of pure story telling. Thankfully this is much less of the case with the Maddaddam book, and even the series in general. These are fun books to read, and overall it is an enjoyable and engaging trilogy to read.

At the same time it is also grappling deeply with important issues that we need to address and come up with a better solution than we have currently managed to date. Atwood is a big fan of George Orwell and 1984 in particular, and both in this book, and in The Testaments and The Handmaid’s Tell she uses the same device of a story recorder, capturing the events, and trying to leave some record for a future audience.

As per her tweet above too, while things do look pretty dire at times, the current out ouring of rage, anxiety and disquiet about the current state of affairs both in the US and also anywhere else where racism has been allowed to remain unchecked, may yet enable positive change to come out of this current turbulence. Maybe the orange troll’s parting gift to us may yet be a better, fairer, more equal society, though one that will also need to pull it’s socks up very rapidly if we are not then going to cause our own extinction through climate change.

Atwood remains a thoughtful and provocative writer, optimistic while also reminding us that we all still have a lot of work to do if we want to make our world a better place, and also even somewhere that is still habitable for us. Vital reading for challenging times.

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