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Clearly, I'm in a small minority here, but I was utterly disappointed by MaddAddam. It's not only a limp conclusion to the trilogy; it's a sequel that is so badly conceived--so slipshod in its plotting, such a betrayal of the characterization of the first two works, and so much a boring retread of themes more cleverly presented the first two times around--that it actually diminishes the achievement of the earlier novels. It may, in fact, be the worst follow-up to a successful novel that I've ever read. If Oryx & Crake is Star Wars, then this novel is The Phantom Menace. *SPOILERS ALERT* There's simply no way to talk about the novel's failures without referring to specific plot points, so read no further if you intend to read MaddAddam but haven't read it yet. The first problem is, having contrived to have Snowman and the Crakers meet up with the survivors of the MaddAddam / God's Gardener's group at the end of both of the previous novels, Atwood was, very clearly, at a total loss as to what to do with them next, how to move the story forward. Therefore, the "forward" plot movement of the novel only starts in earnest after p. 261, when it is (very implausibly) revealed that the Crakers (the genetically-modified humans) can communicate with the pigoons (the genetically-modified pigs) and the latter want the the normal Homo Sapiens's help with killing the two "painballers" captured at the end of Year of the Flood, but who were allowed to escape at the very beginning of this novel (another feeble implausibility). This, despite the fact that the MaddAddamites themselves have also been killing and eating the pigoons all along. So, the remaining humans, relying on the pigoons' sense of smell and a Craker translator, track the two killers down, but not before Snowman and Adam One are allowed to die comically melodramatic, self-sacrificing deaths, worthy of the most sentimentally piffling of Dickens's endings. Atwood does understand that this wee episode--"bad guys escape; good guys hang around doing nothing in particular for several months; good guys track down bad guys"--isn't nearly enough of a plot to construct an entire novel around. So, most of the novel has nothing to do with that. Instead, it's backstory--yet more backstory, in a series of novels that has already consisted largely of flashbacks--this time about the previously peripheral character of Zeb. Alas, this new backstory must rank as some of the very worst writing Atwood has ever done. It is completely haphazard, un-thought-out, driveling, and trivial. It reads, for all the world, like a very bad parody of Thomas Pynchon. Zeb steals millions of dollars from his father, a corrupt fraud of a fundamentalist preacher, and goes on the lam, spending hundreds of pages flitting from one nonsensical disguise to another: a pilot for an environmental group aiding polar bears, a burger flipper, a professional hacker, a magician's assistant, a toilet cleaner, a bouncer, a gardener, a data-entry drone...and probably others I'm forgetting. Not a single one of these incarnations is well-developed...or even lasts long enough long enough for me to begin to be interested in the new environment where Atwood has randomly inserted Zeb, always for only a single chapter, with no rhyme or reason. Whether working the most menial of jobs or more middle-class covers there's *never* actually a compelling reason for Zeb to be where he finds himself, especially since he supposedly has millions in the bank. It's all a chaotic, vapid shaggy dog story with no punchline at the end, told largely in annoyingly ersatz Raymond Chandler-eque "tough guy" speak. Worse than the unnecessariness of Zeb's story, though, is the sheer sloppiness of its plotting. At one point, for instance, Zeb is assigned the important task of smuggling some dangerous new bio-engineered pills out of the HelthWyzer West compound where he has been working. The description of this goes on for pages and pages: the precautions Zeb takes when leaving the compound; the precautions taken hiding them at his new place of employ; how careful they are not to reveal the hiding place. Then, on a whim, he uses half of the pills in an act of revenge, and mayhem ensues. Following this, the person who asked him to smuggle the pills in the first place, Pilar, decides it might just be a good idea to find out what's actually in them. But then that plan to analyze the pills is casually abandoned, and the mysterious pills are simply retained by Pilar. And then, equally casually, after some years, they are sent to the young Crake as a legacy after Pilar's demise. And then Crake (it is presumed) uses them as the basis for his own BlyssPlus pills that destroy humanity. Huh? What a muddle. All these cloak-and-dagger peregrinations and machinations...but then Crake gets the keys to destroying humanity almost as an afterthought? Or did the saintly Pilar of YOTF actually intend that he use them in precisely that way? Atwood's intentions here are entirely opaque. It's especially frustrating, as the long-hinted-at connection between the God's Gardeners and Crake otherwise never comes to full fruition. Likewise, Zeb and Adam have to live in hiding for years and years, but then end up living together openly in the same community using their real names? It hardly makes any sense. In all, MaddAddam reads like a first draft that nobody dared question or revise--an improvisation in which loose ends, instead of being tied up, are multiplied exponentially. Also, as a scant handful of insightful reviewers here have pointed out, the characters of Toby, Ren, Amanda, and Snowman (irritatingly referred to here mostly as "Snowman-the-Jimmy") bear only a passing resemblance to the major characters of the same name in the earlier novels. Tough, self-reliant Toby of YOTF has become a simpering and pathetically insecure helpmate to Zeb--forever girlishly worried that he's eyeing one of the younger surviving women. Ren is a virtual non-entity, relegated to one or two unmemorable lines every 50 pages or so. And Snowman spends most of the book in a coma...and when he finally wakes up, he's without a scintilla of the self-awareness or irony that animated the narrative voice of Oryx & Crake. The "continuity" failure in relation to the previous novels is almost complete. And the brief reappearance of Adam as a hostage at the end of novel proves to be pointless as well as being utterly beyond belief. Being Atwood, the novel is, of course, not 100% bad. There's a good deal of wit in Toby's attempts to render Zeb's stories about his life into a form the innocent Crakers can comprehend and use as the basis for a newly-minted bible / creation myth of their own. And some of the details about day-to-day life in a post-Apocalyptic world are cleverly worked out. On the whole, however, this is a very sorry misstep from an author I've previously admired very much. I rather wish I hadn't read it and had spared myself this saccharine and third-rate chaser to the enjoyable Oryx & Crake and Year of the Flood.