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The Posh, the Privileged and the Paranormal

The Posh, the Privileged and the Paranormal

Tag Archives: margaret atwood

Review – MaddAddam

30 Monday Dec 2013

Posted by georgianaderwent in Uncategorized

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dystopia, literary fiction, maddaddam, margaret atwood, oryx and crake, review, sci-fi

Tomorrow, all being well, I’ll be posting some sort of review of my reading year. But the year is not over yet, and with the luxury of time that the holidays provide, I’m trying to get a few final books read before it draws to a close. One book that I devoured over Christmas was MaddAddam, and my review of it is below. 

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THE BLURB (and my goodness, what a rubbish blurb it is – if I hadn’t read the earlier books, I’d have thought it was utter trash based on this description. Also, what on earth is going on with the British cover with the flying pig?)

A man-made plague has swept the earth, but a small group survives, along with the green-eyed Crakers – a gentle species bio-engineered to replace humans. Toby, onetime member of the God’s Gardeners and expert in mushrooms and bees, is still in love with street-smart Zeb, who has an interesting past. The Crakers’ reluctant prophet, Snowman-the-Jimmy, is hallucinating; Amanda is in shock from a Painballer assault; and Ivory Bill yearns for the provocative Swift Fox, who is flirting with Zeb. Meanwhile, giant Pigoons and malevolent Painballers threaten to attack.

 Told with wit, dizzying imagination, and dark humour, Booker Prize-winning Margaret Atwood’s unpredictable, chilling and hilarious MaddAddam takes us further into a challenging dystopian world – a moving and dramatic conclusion to the internationally celebrated trilogy that began with Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood.

MaddAddam (MaddAddam Trilogy #3)

MY REVIEW

I’m a big fan of Margaret Atwood. The quality of her prose, her characters, and her imagination is such that she writes some of the few realistic, contemporary tales that I’m happy to read. Nonetheless, I still think she’s at her best when she’s writing full-blown science-fiction with a literary edge. While the Handmaid’s Tale is probably the best known example of this, I actually prefer Oryx and Crake and its sequel, the Year of the Floor. The series presents one of the most intriguing and well-developed futuristic dystopias I’ve ever come across, combined with an interesting plot set both before and after the plague deliberately designed to wipe out humanity and replace it with a race of genetically modified perfect beings.

Oryx and Crake dealt with the upper-echelons of society and the scientific genius who created the plague and the new humans, while Year of the Flood told the interlocking story of the underclass and the God’s Gardeners environmentalist cult. The two books worked well together to fill in each other’s blanks, give various different perspectives on the world and the plot, and create a fully rounded universe. I was therefore unsure what else this third book could add.

As with the earlier books, MaddAddam presents both a linear narrative of life after the “Waterless Flood” for the handful of survivors, and flashbacks to life in the pre-plague world of genetic engineering, stark class divides, and armed corporations.

The “modern-day” sections focus on Toby, who is holed up with a combination of God’s Gardeners, former MaddAddam affiliates, a (mostly unconscious) Jimmy from the first book, and a large group of Crakers, the new humans, to whom she tells selective stories of the past as a sort of creation myth. The focus is on the story-telling sessions, on the group defending themselves against Painballers and the world’s strange man-made animals, and on Toby’s relationship with Zeb. There is very little action, even in relation to the Painballer plot. The storytelling concept and the development of the Crakers was interesting, but otherwise, these sections, while redeemed by Atwood’s writing skills and characterisation, were ultimately quite dull.

The storytelling sessions and Toby’s diary, which ultimately becomes a sort of Bible, are well done, playing with ideas of folklore, origin stories and the development of a shared culture. Though this premise was intriguing, I ultimately felt it was a little laboured and overdone. Constant Craker interruptions and misunderstandings of Toby’s stories became trying when I just wanted to immerse myself in the tale, and the sections told by the Crakers felt a little twee. Cloud Atlas did a similar thing much more succinctly and subtly, by showing how one character’s police interview became a religious text in the future. Still, I’m a firm believer that there shouldn’t be a solid divide between literary and genre fiction, so it’s refreshing to see such complex ideas being explored in this sort of story.

The best parts of the book were the flashbacks. The dystopian world is so well developed that it’s fascinating to spend time there. That said, I didn’t feel that these sections, focussed on Zeb and Adam One this time, added much to what readers have seen in earlier books. Zeb has lots of adventures, but doesn’t really seem to do much. And while it’s heavily implied that Adam is heavily embroiled in various plots, I was no clearer on his actual role in events by the end.

In essence, I don’t think this book needed to be written in order to make this a complete series, and I don’t think it’s as good as its predecessors. That said, the writing, the imagination on display and the fascinating world still make it a pleasure to read, and I raced through it, complex ideas about storytelling and exciting tales of fights with mutant bears alike. I’d definitely recommend to fans of the author and the series, and if you haven’t read the earlier books yet, do so now. If you have, a quick re-read may be in order – at times I struggled to remember the details of earlier plots and it would be interesting to see how they all merge together. I’ve started re-reading Oryx and Crake today to refresh my memory and spend more time immersed in this compelling world. 

Top Ten Tuesday – Autobuy Authors

26 Tuesday Feb 2013

Posted by georgianaderwent in Uncategorized

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books, curtis sittenfeld, david mitchell, george rr martin, jonathan coe, lj smith, margaret atwood, neil gaiman, patrick rothfuss, terry pratchett, top ten tuesday

I’ve been meaning to get involved with this for weeks, and finally, here’s my contribution to Top Ten Tuesday, a weekly feature hosted by the blog, The Broke and the Bookish – http://brokeandbookish.blogspot.co.uk/

Each week they ask people to write a top ten list of something on a literary theme. This week it’s top ten auto-buy authors. That is, those authors whose latest books you would buy without giving much consideration to genre, blurb, reviews etc – you’d just trust in the fact that because it was by them, it was probably worth a read.

I got to five entries on this list in seconds (not what’s now my top five) because like everyone, I have favourites. Beyond that, I started to struggle and I eventually ground to a halt at nine. I generally like to discover new books, series, and authors. Unless I really love an author, I find that either all their books are basically the same and it all gets a bit dull, or most of what they write isn’t as good as the book that got me interested in them in the first place. I also find that it’s a rare series that doesn’t start to get bad if it goes on for more than four or five books.

Nonetheless, the second any of these good people announce another book, I’m heading straight to Amazon, in some cases with slight trepidation, in others in full confidence that whatever they’ve released, it’s going to be amazing.

1)Terry Pratchett is probably the single best example on this list of putting my auto-buy policy into practise. He’s written over forty books and I’ve  read them all. For years, he churned out works that were hysterically funny, brilliantly plotted and strangely profound at a rate of around two books a year.  
 
The Discworld books aren’t as good as they used to be, but a sub-par Terry Pratchett novel is still a pretty entertaining read and I don’t think I’ll ever stop buying them as they come out.
 
2)George R. Martin – like seemingly everyone else in the world, I’m desperately waiting for the final two A Song of Ice and Fire novels. A Dance with Dragons is probably the only book I can remember ordering in advance of publication to make sure I got it on release day.  
 
Over and above that though, I’ve started reading through his back catalogue and the man just has a real gift for storytelling. Fevre Dream is basically a book about steamships, a subject I have pretty much zero interest in, but his writing made it fascinating. (Okay, it also had vampires, which I admittedly love, but they were definitely playing second fiddle to the steamships!) If I heard he had a new book out, in pretty much any genre, I’d give it a whirl.
 
3)Patrick Rothfuss – Patrick is probably the least tried and tested member of this list. He has written precisely two book, both of which are part of the same series, The Kingkiller Chronicles. I will be buying the third and final instalment the second it is released, no question. In fact it’s probably now beaten even A Song of Ice and Fire Book 6 into second place in my “books I cannot wait for  list.” Maybe I’m wrong, but as it’s his writing style I love as much as the plot, I think I’d like anything else he wrote too.
 
4)David Mitchell – I wrote quite enough over the weekend about how much I love Cloud Atlas, DM’s finest work, so I won’t go on about that again. Whilst I don’t think any of his other books, earlier or later, can quite beat that, I’ve read and enjoyed them all.  These include: a collection of loosely joined stories about ghosts; a tale of a young man’s search for his father in modern Japan; a coming of age tale in 1980s England; and an adventure story set in eighteenth century Japan. That’s probably the most varied genre jumping on this list, so I think it’s fair to say that I’ll give anything he writes a go and he can write an astonishingly good book about almost anything.
 
5)Curtis Sittenfeld -In contract, Curtis Sittenfeld seems to write about one thing and one thing only – Preppy, WASPY types coming of age and falling in love. But if that sounds like trashy chick-lit, think again. Her books are inevitably beautifully written and really clever – I definitely file them as literary in my mind. I happen to like stories about posh folk (I prefer the English variety, but American will do in a pinch!) but if her next book happened to be a gritty drama about starving refugees, I’d still snap it up immediately, because this girl can Write.
 
6)Jonathan Coe – I loved Jonathan Coe for What a Carve Up, which battles it out with Cloud Atlas in my best book ever award.  The Rotters Club is also amazing. Since then though, he seems to have gone steadily downhill. Nonetheless, I can always find something to enjoy in his books, and I keep on giving him a chance without really checking what his new releases are about, just in case it’s another Carve Up.
 
7)Margaret Atwood – Great writer, and one of the few who can neatly blur the lines between literary and genre fiction. I prefer her when she veers closer towards the latter, but I always give her new books a go.
 
8)Neil Gaiman – I love all his books, and he even made me read a children’s book (Coraline) and give graphic novels a go (Sandman Series). In both cases, I enjoyed something not just outside of my usual genre but completely outside of the sort of book I’d normally consider.
 
9)LJ Smith – One upon a time Ms Smith would have been near the top of this list. I’ve written before about how her Vampire Diaries series triggered my love of vampire literature and that’s not even my favourite series of hers . That honour falls to the Forbidden Game, the best paranormal series ever. Having read and loved a few of her books, I sought out and devoured the rest in a frenzy. I physically couldn’t read anything else until I’d read everything she’d ever written.
This was all over a decade ago. Then a few years back I heard there was a new VD trilogy coming out and was beyond excited. Except to my horror, it turned out to be absolutely awful. Now I’d approach any new book of hers with caution, though an extract on her website  from something she’s working on looks great, so maybe there’s hope yet. Either way,  I know full well I’d still buy it.  Especially the final book of Night World, which I’ve been waiting for for twelve years. George R Martin fans don’t know the meaning of suffering 😉

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