MaddAddam

MaddAddam
by Margaret Atwood
read: 2014
MaddAddam Series, Book Three

There's a metatextual element to MaddAddam, where the story itself is being written as a conscious part of the story. Toby journals her experiences, even though it's unclear whether in the post-apocalyptic world of the novel that there's even going to be a notion of written history. And after teaching Blackbeard to write, she is unsure whether she should have just let writing and history disappear rather than preserving it.

In The Year of the Flood we learn Toby's backstory and that she's never really found love or happiness. MaddAddam is really Zeb's tale, and we learn that he too has experienced loneliness and heartbreak. In a world that's destroyed, and where the human species is practically on the verge of extinction, it's touching that they find happiness together.

The Year of the Flood

The Year of the Flood
by Margaret Atwood
read: 2014
MaddAddam Series, Book Two

I enjoyed The Year of the Flood less than the other Atwood books I've read. I'm having a hard time understanding whether Atwood (or her narrative voice) is poking fun at the Gardeners or exalting their style of life. Probably her real stance (and the rational one) is somewhere in the middle, or both. Toby and Ren both claim to have doubts about Adam One's teachings, but they find strength and solace in them in times of need.

Random note: Ren's chapters are in first person while Toby's are in third person. I don't have a theory about why that is.

The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
read: 2014
Guardian 1000 Novels

When I was younger I read a lot of fantasy / science fiction novels, and I often enjoyed the world the author created but wanted to see it from the perspective of a "normal" person in it, rather than someone caught up in trying to save the universe. I wish I'd been turned on to Margaret Atwood. The Handmaid's Tale takes place in a dystopian future where women have been largely stripped of their rights. The protagonist isn't the leader of the resistance; she's just an ordinary woman whose role in the new society is to have rich men's babies.

As in The Blind Assassin, it's not to clear to whom the narrator is writing the story. We know that she is basically a prisoner in the Commander's house and has no access to writing utensils or paper, or anywhere to store a manuscript even if she could write it. Periodically she shows awareness that's she's narrating, saying "I would like to believe this is a story I'm telling" or "This is a reconstruction." Later she seems to address the tale to her husband Luke, expressing concern for the audience's perception of her when she has an affair. In the epilogue, which serves a frame story, it's suggested that The Handmaid's Tale is transcribed from taped records made at some point in the process of the narrator attempting to escape.

The frame story shines a spotlight on the "normal" person perspective I highlighted above. The tapes were found decades after the narrator's struggle, and we learn that the patriarchal society has collapsed. But we never learn what happened to "Offred," or even what her real identity was. Even though we know that the horrible oppression has stopped, the narrator's fate still matters. It's easy to look at history's global impact, but events affect individuals, too, and we can forget that. The Handmaid's Tale reminds us.

The Blind Assassin

  
The Blind Assassin
by Margaret Atwood
read: 2013
Time 100 Novels, Guardian 1000 Novels, Man Booker Prize, Orange Prize

In The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood deals with the written word itself, by embedding a story within the story - the title The Blind Assassin refers to a novel-within-the-novel written by the narrator's sister Laura. And within that story, the unnamed male creates stories of his own, crafting pulp and genre tales for the amusement of his lover (presumably Laura in a roman a clef). The novel is partially about storytelling, and how fiction can shape reality.

History is fluid, as Iris, the narrator, notes: "[I]s what I remember the same thing as what actually happened? It is now; I am the only survivor." As a youth, Laura is struck by a passage in The Bible where God himself lies, giving false prophecies. Ultimately, the novel-within-the-novel The Blind Assassin is a lie, written by Iris but published under Laura's name, but that lie becomes part of the fabric of reality, as Laura is adored in death, and symbolically misquoted in graffiti in bathroom stalls. The novel is cut with newspaper article that tell the story of what happens to Iris and Laura but is misleading or incomplete. Language cannot be trusted.

Iris pens the narrative itself for reasons she doesn't fully understand, and it is unclear whether it will even be read. She sums up the unreliability of language in the following quote:

In the beginning was the word, we once believed. Did God know what a flimsy thing the word might be? How tenuous, how casually erased?

Oryx and Crake

Oryx and Crake
by Margaret Atwood
read: circa 2004

Never Let Me Go reminded me quite a bit of Oryx and Crake, a book I read a few years ago. Like Never Let Me Go, Oryx and Crake takes place in a semi-dystopian alternate reality. Both books also deal with the subject of genetic engineering. The scope of the novels is a bit different; the narrator of Oryx and Crake is involved in the destruction of the world, the creation of new beings, and the establishment of the dystopia, while the narrator of Never Let Me Go is a pawn who never quite sees the full picture of what the world was and what it has become. I enjoyed both books, and I'm looking forward to reading more Atwood as I work through my reading lists.