Wednesday, February 12, 2014

MaddAddam

Just finished Margaret Atwood's most recent and last novel in the trilogy that began with the Year of the Flood and was followed by Oryx and Crake.

In retrospect I strongly believe that the trilogy would have benefitted from a different ordering. The first two novels were almost unreadable due to the gaps in the story. After reading MaddAddam I feel like I have to go back and re-read the others to make sense of the whole. Not the way I prefer to ingest my fiction.

Atwood is one of my favorite authors and I'm not sure of the rationale behind her choice of reversing the chronology. It almost seems like a plot device created because the story couldn't stand on its own.

Perhaps this quote provides an answer:
"There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too." (p56)