Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy has asked us to ignore some pretty blatant coincidences in its effort to extend from a first standalone novel to an ongoing series, the most onerous of which is to believe that quite a lot of people who all knew each other managed to survive an apocalypse and then run into each other after. Characters may have been far-flung, estranged or just plain unlikely to survive, but regardless, they manage to evade a human-race-threatening event and also find each other on the other side. Since the novels run in two timelines, past and present, it helps matters a lot when folks you met in one character's telling of the past pop up in another's or in a third character's future. And because you get the sense that the novels are much more interested in the world they're describing than the people (with the possible exception of Oryx and Crake's Snowman/Jimmy), it's been possible, if not entirely comfortable, to let go of unlikelihood of this bunch of people's good fortune. However, that falls down in MaddAddam when (SPOILER) Zeb shows up, as a mouthpiece for Adam's past and one half of a central love story with The Year of the Flood's main protagonist Toby.
Friday 4 October 2013
A review of MaddAddam
Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy has asked us to ignore some pretty blatant coincidences in its effort to extend from a first standalone novel to an ongoing series, the most onerous of which is to believe that quite a lot of people who all knew each other managed to survive an apocalypse and then run into each other after. Characters may have been far-flung, estranged or just plain unlikely to survive, but regardless, they manage to evade a human-race-threatening event and also find each other on the other side. Since the novels run in two timelines, past and present, it helps matters a lot when folks you met in one character's telling of the past pop up in another's or in a third character's future. And because you get the sense that the novels are much more interested in the world they're describing than the people (with the possible exception of Oryx and Crake's Snowman/Jimmy), it's been possible, if not entirely comfortable, to let go of unlikelihood of this bunch of people's good fortune. However, that falls down in MaddAddam when (SPOILER) Zeb shows up, as a mouthpiece for Adam's past and one half of a central love story with The Year of the Flood's main protagonist Toby.
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