MaddAddam

A common theme across all three novels is repetition of distant, unloving, and sometimes abusive relationships between parents and children. Jimmy’s mother was a Corp scientist who stopped working, supposedly to be home with Jimmy (although he was at school all day) but was agitated about what the Corps was doing. She left her husband and son to become an activist, passing briefly through God’s Gardeners and eventually being executed on a livestream. Neither parent could remember Jimmy’s birthday. Ren’s father was disinterested, and her mother remarried after he died suddenly, disowning Ren to the point that she pretended not to know her when she saw her at the spa. Zeb and Adam had an abusive father who murdered Adam’s mother and tried to kill them. Toby had a good relationship with her parents, but the Corps drained them financially treating her sick mother until she died, probably of a disease embedded in Corps vitamins, and her father killed himself, leaving her to bury his body. Glenn/Crake’s parents didn’t touch him. No one touched him, as observed by Zeb. His mother flirts vulgarly with one of her son’s only friends and marries the man she’s cheating with when his father is murdered by the Corps (ruled a suicide). Later, his mother dies horribly from an unknown bioform, and Jimmy wonders if she wasn’t his first test subject.

Lackluster and cruel parenting seems to have been a major problem in a collapsing society, and it was an issue regardless of financial status. Parents in the compounds are at best too preoccupied with work to pay attention to their kids and at worst cruel. The pleeblands are full of children who are on their own, like Amanda, who ran away from her abusive family. Those who joined the Gardeners found a surrogate family, where the community raised children who didn’t seem to have parents of their own. The Gardeners offered a multitude of parents, Adams and Eves named after the original parents of humanity. The novels suggest that either the decline in parenting contributes to a broken society, or a broken society is destroying parental relationships, but it’s certainly a significant issue. In designing the Crakers, Crake reorganizes the family structure. First, he takes away paternal lineage. The three women impregnated by Crakers demonstrate that four men are not necessary to achieve one pregnant woman, but he is disposing of the idea of fatherhood. Parenting becomes a group responsibility, and no one has corporate jobs or spa treatments to distract them. Children also grow up much more quickly than non-Craker babies, shortening the period in which they require attentive parenting.

Within the community of plague survivors, the question of reproduction takes time to arise openly. Toby feels the weight of her age and infertility as making her less feminine and less worthy of love, especially from Zeb, who she sees as a prime reproductive partner. Swift Fox shows the others the pregnancy tests she found, and she asserts that they have a duty to repopulate the human race. When Amanda discovers her pregnancy, she wants an abortion, but with no safe options, she must carry to term, waiting to find out if she was impregnated by one of her rapists. Practically speaking, pregnancy is dangerous for the women, and when men are brought into the conversation, they start to speak about the women as if they are incubators. Ivory Bill’s suggestion that they save Painballer sperm to preserve genetic diversity is entirely disregarding the women as humans who are understandably repulsed by the idea. The Crakers make the pregnant women, especially Amanda, feel empowered by their ability to gestate life. They are not just empty “bone caves” to fill. Toby, who has the encounter with the pigoon mother, is naturally maternal to Ren and Amanda. She risks her life to save theirs, and she’s the one they go to with their pregnancies. For Blackbeard, she becomes an honorary community mother, as his mother trusts her entirely, and she teaches him things that his mother can’t. Toby can’t give birth, but she is maternal, helping to create a new generation with extended family support. This focus on maternal behavior also highlights the theme of Hope in a Post-Apocalyptic World in that it mends the wounds of parental neglect that the previous generations endured. The narrative suggests that the ills of the human race can be traced to the failures of parents to truly nurture their children, so starting anew with humans who care for their children and each other in a kind and nurturing manner suggests that there is hope that this new world will avoid the tragedies that led to the dystopia and destruction of the previous world.