The most recent book I finished was Margaret Atwood's "MaddAddam," the final entry in her Oryx and Crake trilogy. And god, it's a disappointment.
Oryx and Crake was a fantastic dystopian cautionary tale. Just amazing in its detail and world building and I marveled at her ability to construct this horrifying yet oddly plausible glimpse into the near future. At the same time, the novel also functions as this very realistic and relateable bildungsroman of a young boy. You wouldn't expect this elderly woman on the book jacket to write about the childhood of a boy in such an authentic manner, or at least I didn't. But she does, and it feels truthful in a way that the best coming of age stories do..
Of course, Oryx and Crake isn't a perfect story. I would say that the character of Oryx is a cypher and not really a character at all. She's just the object of desire for the two main characters, in my eyes. There didn't seem to be much to her, and it felt like she was in the story mainly to allow Atwood to divert the book into her own personal soapbox to preach about the horrors of child sex slavery in southeast Asia. Which we all already know is horrible. So that whole section of the book feels out of place and doesn't contribute anything to the rest of her story which focuses on the dangers of genetic engineering and corporations run amok.
So overall... really enjoyed Oryx and Crake. The sequel The Year of the Flood was not quite as good, but I also loved it, simply because it gave us more of that incredible world that we were introduced to. There were a few nagging coincidences that seemed a little unlikely, but I forgave them because the new characters were intriguing and seeing the same world from a new fresh perspective was fun. It was a bildungsroman from the opposite sex's point of view and that was refreshing.
But MaddAddam goes way too far and completely flies off into crazy town. Huge tracts of the novel read like really cheap romance novels, with strong female characters established in the previous books now reduced to pining away for men in flowery internal narration that is positively vomit inducing. Where did this soap opera nonsense come from? I dunno, maybe Margaret Atwood fell in love while writing this book and it inevitably crept in. But I don't like it.
The coincidences that you started noticing in Year of the Flood now just completely take over the book and become ridiculous and overwhelming in their absurdity. Apparently... the only people who can manage to survive the apocalypse were all conveniently from Jimmy's homeroom. And ended up dating him at one time in his life. Wait, what? What? Jesus H Christ... it's just goofy nonsense.
And let's talk about Jimmy. The great, sympathetic character from the first book who we were missing from the second novel. Well, now we're gonna get to go back to this guy. Oh wait... except he's in a damn coma for half of the book. I mean, the whole reason we got drawn into this trilogy in the first place was because we loved this complicated, somewhat damaged boy from Oryx and Crake. He was a relateable slacker and we cheered on his perseverance in the face of doomsday. So just dragging it out and keeping him out of the first half of the book just felt needlessly cruel and frustrating.
But things don't really get any better when he wakes from his coma. Because Atwood seems to have forgotten how to write Jimmy. He's not sympathetic or likeable now... he's just kinda crude and distant. I dunno, I really liked Jimmy in the first book but here, he's pretty much wasted as a character. There's no bond between the character and the reader, which might have been Atwood's intentions I suppose. Perhaps she felt she'd drained him of all narrative potential at the end of the first novel. And then, Atwood literally wastes the character by killing him off at the end. But it's not even done well... it's practically done off camera, which is absurd. What an unceremonious end for this once compelling protagonist.
And finally, I've gotta address the most disturbing and tasteless aspect of the novel... which are the pregnancies of the female characters in the book. There is no reason why Atwood had to shroud these in secrecy for most of the book, while somehow justifying it by explaining that these women wouldn't know whether they had been gangraped by a tribe of strange blue men. That just does not make any sense to me. It's insulting and icky and made me wonder about the state of Atwood's mind. If a bunch of well-meaning blue men suddenly grabbed you and started running a train on you... I think you'd remember that. I don't believe this is something that would be in doubt or forgotten about.
I can't help feeling that MaddAddam was simply an opportunity for Atwood to cash in on the success and popularity of the first two books. She had to whip up something to cap off the trilogy and managed to conjure up something monstrous and yet flimsy in narrative. I'd say just steer clear and keep rereading the first two novels.
Yeah, it hit me really hard too. I'm still not sure how or when exactly how it happened. I blinked and suddenly the whole scenario was grave and touching and had me gripped firmly by the emotional throat.
