MaddAddam

“‘Once the roots get in,’ Adam One had been fond of saying to the Gardener inner circle, ‘Once they really take hold, no human-built structure stands a chance. They’ll tear a paved road apart in a year.’”

Toby is quoting Adam speaking about the power of nature and how quickly it will overtake any manmade structure. Cities that took decades or centuries to build can be ripped apart in a couple of years. After the plague, it won’t be long before the cities crash to the ground.

“There was only so much of that people could stand, judging from the ratings, which spiked and then plummeted as viewers voted with their thumbs, switching from imminent wipeout to real-time contests about hotdog-swallowing if they liked nostalgia, or to sassy-best-girlfriends comedies if they liked stuffed animals, or to Mixed Martial Arts Felony Fights if they liked bitten-off ears, or to Nitee-Nite live-streamed suicides or HottTott kissy porn or Hedsoff real-time executions if they were truly jaded. All of it so much more palatable than the truth.”

There was a brief trend of videos that featured computer simulations of how quickly nature would destroy humanmade structures after humans disappeared, but even though it was true and imminent, audiences lost interest. People have short attention spans, and even the demise of the human race can only hold their attention for so long, especially in a culture where so much that is taboo is commercially sold.

“But why not? thinks Toby. Why shouldn’t they be here? Nothing in the material world died when the people did. Once, there were too many people and not enough stuff; now it’s the other way around. But physical objects have shucked their tethers—Mine, Yours, His, Hers—and have gone wandering off on their own.”

Toby notices the oddness of the fine china and dining chairs in their little camp. Treasured belongings lose their meaning when there is no one to treasure them. Her observation highlights how tenuously possessions have significance: They only have value when there’s someone else to want them.

“Why is war so much like a practical joke? she thinks. Hiding behind bushes, leaping out, with not much difference between Boo! and Bang! except the blood. The loser falls over with a scream, followed with a foolish expression, mouth agape, eyes akimbo. Those old biblical kings, setting their feet on conquered necks, stringing up rival kings on trees, rejoicing in piles of heads – there was an element of childish glee in all that. Maybe it’s what drove Crake on, thinks Toby. Maybe he wanted to end it. Cut that part out of us: the grinning, elemental malice. Begin us anew.”

As Toby experiences anxiety about the possibility of being surprised by the Painballers, she thinks about how violence is undignified and ridiculous. Taking pleasure in violence is childish, something humans ought to grow out of once they develop empathy. To have survived the end of the world only to be killed pointlessly by other survivors is absurd and unfair, and it’s understandable to want to remove that part of humanity that enjoys hurting one another.

“They’d take one look at their lunatic of a creator and jump off a skyscraper. If there were still any skyscrapers to jump off.”

Swift Fox, like the other MaddAddamites, had good reason to despise Crake before the plague, but all the survivors are justified in finding it irritating that the Crakers worship him like a god. This foreshadows the battle when Blackbeard will see Crake’s remains and respond with despaired weeping, but his belief is stronger than his senses, and he will believe Toby’s explanation that the bodies are like husks, so no one will try to jump off skyscrapers. Swift Fox is underestimating how their faith will allow them to overlook things that contradict their beliefs.

“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.”

The novel is about storytelling and the way lore is passed down to create history, but what is codified into history is only part of the story. It’s one person’s perspective, filtered and changed to suit the audience. Zeb tells his stories because Toby asks for them, and he loves Toby. He glosses over some of the sexual content for her sake. She simplifies the story to tell the Crakers. It’s important to remember that stories, even first-person accounts, are only one facet of history.

“‘I remember adapt,’ says Toby. ‘It was another way of saying tough luck. To people you weren’t going to help out.’”

Toby and Zeb discuss Bearlift, which claimed to be feeding bears until they could adapt to the destroyed environment. As people became concerned about the state of the environment, “adapt” became a buzzword as a euphemism for being left alone to either suffer and die or find a new way to survive without assistance or change. For those in power, it’s a new way of framing doing nothing without admitting that they’re doing nothing.

“What to eat, where to shit, how to take shelter, who and what to kill: are these the basics? thinks Toby. Is this what we’ve come to, or come down to; or else come back to? And who do you love? And who loves you? And who loves you not? And, come to think of it, who seriously hates you?”

Toby is reading the old graffiti on the park’s bathroom walls, which are covered in pleebrat declarations of love, hatred, and violence along with scatological jokes. Now that the survivors are stripped down to the basics, these questions are their day-to-day survival issues. Even love and hatred are issues of survival and propagation.

“The Craker men are nervous around the younger cobb-house women now. Ever since they’ve learned that rambunctious group copulation is not acceptable, they don’t know what’s expected of them.”

One of the first ways that Toby and the other survivors shift the way the Crakers function is to impress upon the men the concept of consent. Consent isn’t an issue in their mating process because women who are blue want to mate. Crake did away with the idea of saying no. Since the misunderstanding that happened with Ren and Amanda doesn’t recur, this emphasizes that biology and instinct are only part of what drives behavior in humans, who unlike most animals, can reason.

“‘Pious as hell,’ says Zeb. ‘I’ve always liked that phrase. In my humble view, pious and hell are the flip sides of the same coin.’”

Zeb plays with words to make the ironic juxtaposition of piety and hell, since those are supposed to be opposing terms, entirely contingent upon the framework of religion. But Zeb’s experience of religion is based on corruption. The Rev uses piety as a shield while putting his wrongdoings out in the open. Piety doesn’t mean goodness. It means following—or appearing to follow—religious doctrine.

“Zeb was the bad one who was good at bad things, Adam was the good one who was bad at good things. Or who used good things as a front for his bad things.”

As a child, Zeb was treated as the bad son and raised with the constant comparison to Adam as the good son. It’s a stigma that follows him and shapes his understanding of himself. Adam is just better at the appearance of goodness. He doesn’t get his hands dirty, but he orchestrates (supposedly) bad things. The nature of good and bad are subjective, especially in the context of religion.

“Blood is thinner than money. He’d hear a convenient voice from God, suggesting a son sacrifice for the greater good. Remember Isaac. He’d slit our throats and set fire to us, because this time God wouldn’t send a sheep.”

Zeb expresses disbelief at the idea of the Rev actually killing his sons, but Adam is more realistic. The Rev could easily spin the situation as an echo of Abraham and Isaac but without God’s interruption. He would dispose of the children who share his blood for money because money and power are all he cares about. Ironically, Zeb will discover that neither the Rev nor Adam are biologically related to him, but his love for Adam shows that blood isn’t very thick after all.

“Okay. The Lady Jane Greys were repeatable. Reality’s not. And since you’re wondering, they’re both good sometimes. But it can be disappointing either way.”

Toby asks Zeb whether his first experiences of real sex were better than all prior experiences of virtual sex, and Zeb doesn’t want to answer at first, but Toby presses. They are living in a world that no longer has virtual sex as an option, but prior to the plague, virtual experiences of all kinds were transplanting real experiences. Zeb assumes that she wants to hear that the real experiences are better, but both offer different things. Repetition has its merits, but certainly spontaneity does as well.

“Had she believed all that? Old Pilar’s folklore? No, not really; or not exactly. Most likely Pilar hadn’t quite believed it either, but it was a reassuring story: that the dead were not entirely dead but were alive in a different way; a paler way admittedly and somewhat darker. But still able to send messages, if only such messages could be recognized and deciphered. People need such stories, Pilar said once, because however dark, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent void.”

From the time Toby enters the Gardeners and then becomes an Eve, Toby questions whether she is a believer. She speaks to the bees anyway, even in the post-apocalyptic world where she doesn’t need to perform believing. She is always skeptical, but there is also a part of her that wants to believe, even though she has never been the type of person to believe in spirituality.

“‘At least I take the trouble to lie, for you,’ says Zeb. ‘Lying’s more work than the bare-naked truth. Think of it as a courtship display. I’m aging badly, I’ve got wear and tear, I don’t have a giant blue dong like our Craker friends out there, so I need to use my wits. What’s left of them.’”

Toby is constantly worried that she isn’t good enough for Zeb and that he couldn’t possibly love her like she loves him. She believes he couldn’t possibly be satisfied with only her, but Zeb tries to tell her that he is just as insecure about his worthiness for being with Toby. He downplays his relationship with Lucerne, knowing that Toby is bothered by it. What Toby sees as a tendency to lie about one thing being a tendency to lie about everything (such as her fears of a simultaneous relationship with Swift Fox) is what Zeb sees as shaping the story to make her happy. In the end, she decides that she doesn’t want to know.

“The possibility of injury or death was a strong attraction: as the online world became more and more pre-edited and slicked up, and as even its so-called reality sites raised questions about authenticity in the minds of the viewers, the rough, unpolished physical world was taking on a mystic allure.”

As Zeb explains, in a world that has become increasingly virtual, liveness, especially in the pleeblands where anything could happen, had a new allure. Liveness seemed to equal authenticity, whereas online content could be easily faked. Witnessing real injury or death was a thrill, a way of consuming a unique moment in the performer’s life as entertainment.

“What comes next? Rules, dogma, laws? The Testament of Crake? How soon before there are ancient texts they feel they have to obey but have forgotten how to interpret? Have I ruined them?”

Toby teaches Blackbeard to write his name, and he runs off with the paper and pencil to practice and learn more. She realizes the weight of writing and what it means for a culture. Introducing writing, which Blackbeard will undoubtedly master quickly, crosses a new line in their development. She worries that she is opening the door to turning the Crakers into a culture that writes texts that become unchangeable and more powerful than their wills and instincts as living beings.

“There have been some jokes about lamb stew, but no one wants to go there: somehow it would be hard to slaughter and eat an animal with human hair; especially human hair that so closely resembles, in its sheen and stylability, the shampoo ads of yore.”

The survivors don’t eat the Mo’Hairs, and the Painballers’ killing and eating the stolen red Mo’Hair is met with distress. They show how humans pick and choose which animals are for killing and eating, and which aren’t. Not only do the Mo’Hairs have human hair, but they are also like pets. When one of them gives birth to two shiny-haired lambs, they would never actually eat them.

“But when it comes to ‘belief,’ I’m not so sure. Though as he’d say, what is ‘belief’ but a willingness to suspend the negatives? […] He said that if you acted according to belief, that was the same thing. As having the belief.”

Toby struggles with the idea of belief or faith, and she explained this to Adam because she wasn’t sure if she should take the position of Eve Six if she didn’t really believe. Adam urged her to do the vision quest anyway and that action was more important than belief. This idea counters the position of most religions, in which action can be forgiven by belief, because belief is what matters. Adam’s view is more pragmatic, as what matters to the world and those around them is what they do.

“Health and Beauty, the two seductive twins joined at the navel, singing their eternal songs. A lot of people would pay through their nose jobs for either one. […] But Zeb could understand that there was an overlap of interests. If it hurts and you feel sick and it’s making you ugly, take this, from HelthWyzer; if you’re ugly and it hurts and you feel sick about it, take that, from AnooYoo.”

HelthWyzer cornered the intersecting markets of health and beauty, which are arguably the most sought-after qualities and hardest to achieve. Health staves off death, and beauty attracts love to stave off loneliness. None of the Corps could really promise either, since health and beauty are, in part, a matter of luck, but convincing people that they could was highly profitable.

“‘Let’s put it this way,’ says Zeb. ‘All the real Gardeners believed the human race was overdue for a population crash. It would happen anyway, and maybe sooner was better.’”

The Gardeners were a pacifist group, learning about violence only in the context of self-defense. But Zeb’s account brings to light the information that Pilar and Adam sent the chess piece with the bioform-vector pills to Crake, and they probably had an idea of what he would do with them. Humans were already headed toward an apocalyptic event, but that would likely take a long time, and they would take more of the planet with them. Adam’s setup of Zeb to kill the Rev sets a precedent that suggests that he might be similarly setting up Crake to do the dirty work that he believes needs to be done.

“If we were carrying a flag, thinks Toby, what would be on it?”

Going into battle with the MaddAddamite survivors united with the pigoons and Blackbeard representing the Crakers gives Toby an odd sense of nationalism, but the boundaries of their nation are strange and unlike any in the world before the plague. The Crakers’ lack of aggression was part of Crake’s attempt to end ideas of nationalism that turn into warring nations, but he accidentally left violent aggressors alive, forcing the other survivors to defend themselves and their territory.

“‘Oh Toby, is this Oryx and this is Crake?’ he says. ‘Snowman-the-Jimmy said! But they are a smelly bone, they are many smelly bones! Oryx and Crake must be beautiful! Like the stories! They cannot be a smelly bone!’ He begins to cry as if his heart will break. Toby kneels, folds her arms around him, hugs him tight. What to say? How to comfort him? In the face of this terminal sorrow.”

The Crakers think literally, and being confronted with the bodies of Oryx and Crake contradicts their entire belief system. They don’t have a concept of spirits, and the idea that Oryx and Crake are dead, reduced to the worst thing that Crakers can imagine—smelly or rotting bones—is devastating. To appease his sorrow, which Toby feels as if she is his mother, Toby gives them the concept of souls. This is a new stage in their religious development, which will likely raise the notion of their bodies having souls and possibly the question of what makes them good or bad enough to have their souls join with Oryx and Crake when they die.