"The Year of the Flood" & "Maddaddam" by Margaret Atwood

2009, #2 in the trilogy

2013, # 3 in the trilogy

These two novels are the successors to Atwood's 2003 Oryx & Crake. These two later novels complete this dystopian trilogy. 

I wrote how horrifying Oryx and Crake was for me. Not in a horror story fashion, but in the way that Orwell's 1984 and such can be labeled "horror." That is, not by the fright elements of some supernatural or embodied form of metaphysical evil, but by the plausibility of the evil described, the banality of some future state that conjures up a more mundane but no less lethal evil. But these two later journies give us some respite from what struck me as the overweening sense of doom in the first novel. 

Not that anything is "good" in these novels, except the few people in it who survive and attempt some modicum of humanity. The Year of the Flood focuses on two female characters in the story, Ren and Toby (and to a lesser extent on a third, Amanda). Their stories draw us in and arouse a sense of sympathy with their struggles to survive and thrive. Thus, unlike Oryx & Crake, which overwhelmed me with foreboding of inevitable doom,in The Year of the Flood I didn't feel plagued by this sense, bad as situations were in this novel for these lead characters. The main characters come from the world of corporate gated communities and corporate enterprises (the nation-state is non-existent), as opposed to those who live and work in the "pleeblands."  Also, the main characters all become involved with "God's Gardners" an eco-apocalyptic Christian group. (Cult? Perhaps.) The group is led by the charismatic Adam One, and they prepare for the "waterless flood" that will soon overtake the earth. In the meantime, the group squirrels away provisions in "arhats." Their calendar is marked with a unique panoply of saints, such as "Saint Euell Gibbons" (for those old enough: the Grapenuts guy), "Saint Jane Goodall," "Saint Rachel Carson," and the like. The Gardners are pacific but not without guile. 

The concluding book, Maddaddam, takes one of the peripheral characters in The Year of the Flood, Zeb, and focuses on his story and those who survive what became the "waterless flood." Zeb is the scoundrel and survivor, and he contrasts to the pacifist-prone Adam One. In addition to learning Zeb's backstory (via a clumsy but perhaps necessary plot device), we learn about those who survived into the post-flood world. These groups include a band of post-Gardner humans; super-intelligent "pigoons" (genetically altered pigs); "Crakers," genetically modified humans with pacific and randy traits; and "Painballers," debased criminals who have survived the punishment turned spectacle of "Painball," an experience much like the hunger games of Susan Collins's series of that name. And while this post-apocalyptic novel has cruelties and horrors abounding, it is a tale of survival and learning and of the human enterprise. 

It seems to me that dystopian fiction always has a prophetic element inherent in it. And by prophetic, I don't mean foretelling the future, like a soothsayer or fortune teller, but of providing a moral exhortation in the form of an implied "if-then" proposition, in the manner of Old Testament prophets or Cassandra in Greek mythology. Perhaps the reason that the year 1984 was not too much like the Orwell's 1984 is that we heeded, even in the slightest echos, Orwell's implicit prophecy. So it should be with Atwood's trilogy. Inherent in this extended tale is a vision of the future that I hope no sane person would want. Yet it is all too plausible. The dis-ease with which one leaves this trilogy should remain with us and give us pause as we choose our future.