Oryx and Crake is the only Atwood novel with a male narrator. They mate seasonally and are free from sexual jealousy, kinship structures, or hierarchies of any kind. Here they live free of fear, anger, the need for clothing, agriculture (they are herbivores), or insecticide. Jimmy shepherds the Crakers from their biological birthplace to the seashore, which he hopes is comparatively safer. The “humans” Crake and his colleagues created survived the waterless flood, along with Jimmy, who Crake was careful to inoculate, ensuring his creations, nicknamed Crakers, would have a caregiver.

Jimmy and Crake were best friends Jimmy was in love with Oryx and longs for her. Crake and his lover, Oryx, perished in the “chaos” following the waterless flood. Unfortunately, BlyssPluss also contained a nasty microbe that wiped out most of mankind in what God’s Gardeners called “the waterless flood”. Crake was also hard at work on a pill he dubbed BlyssPluss, guaranteed to give users birth control, sexual ecstasy, and youthful vigor. These people were rounded up by one of the players, Glenn, aka Crake, and forced to work for him creating a perfected race of humans. Players of Extinctathon, as part of the game’s rules, had to take the name of an extinct species. Other survivors include former players of the internet game Extinctathon, a cover for people who perpetrated acts against the elite Corporate Compounds and the ruling security force, the CorpSeCorps. There are a few God’s Gardeners, chronicled in The Year of the Flood, including Amanda, Ren, Shackelton, and Crozier. Jimmy, who in MaddAddam becomes Snowman-The-Jimmy, is far from the only human left alive. If you have not read the first two books of the series, I envy you the pleasure that awaits. Unless readers have read Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, reading MaddAddam with true comprehension and full appreciation is nearly impossible. The book ends just as he’s about to find out. Feverish and sick, he had no idea if these people were good or evil. Five years ago, Jimmy, aka Snowman, thinking himself the last man alive, had stumbled onto the beach and spotted two men and a woman.

The final installment of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian MaddAddam series gives readers a brief summary of the first two books, Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, then picks up where readers were left breathlessly hanging when The Year of the Flood concluded, in 2009.

Maddaddam by margaret atwood