MaddAddam

Toby knows little about Zeb, who appears in The Year of the Flood, except that he lived with the Gardeners as an Adam and lived with Lucerne, leading Toby to assume that pretty and obnoxious is his type. He is the ipso facto leader of the survivor group at the cobb house, and he is always the first to head into danger when needed. To feed the Crakers’ fascination with him (as well as Toby’s), Zeb tells Toby his life story. His abusive childhood and spending most of his adult life changing identities to run from the Rev, his father who wasn’t really his father, has made him tough and given him a tendency to use humor as a cover for fear. He has a habit of making up songs and singing to himself when he’s anxious. Toby sees him as an enigma, unsure when to take him seriously or trust his expressions of love. She worries that he’ll have sex with another woman, especially Swift Fox, but Zeb asserts that he’s always loyal to the woman he’s with. However, he can also make sexist comments and jokes, which makes Toby doubt his ability to take their relationship seriously. Before Toby, the only person Zeb had ever really loved was his brother Adam, a love that Zeb shows by teasing him. Zeb has been compared to Adam his entire life and told he was the wicked brother. Adam, who grew up afraid to be anything but perfect, sometimes enlists Zeb, often tacitly, to carry out things that he can’t bring himself to do. For instance, he gives Zeb the means and opportunity to kill the Rev, and Zeb not only kills him but overkills him. Zeb holds out hope that Adam is alive and he will find him, but finding him only to lose him again destroys Zeb. He shows Toby how much he loves her by marrying her in the Gardener tradition, and they are together until he dies.

As a child, Ren was born in a compound with a wealthy father and a mother, Lucerne, who was more invested in spa treatments than nurturing. Lucerne dragged young Ren off to the pleeblands for what she saw as a romantic dash running away from her husband with her lover, Zeb. They lived with the God’s Gardeners, an oddly unromantic choice, and Ren was raised for a while with the Gardeners’ teaching and traditions until Lucerne left Zeb and whisked Ren back to the compounds. Ren reassimilates but stays best friends with Amanda, although Lucerne tries to keep them from contacting each other. Ren’s father dies, so Lucerne remarries and cuts Ren off financially and as a daughter, which prevents Ren from finishing school. Ren ends up working at Scales and Tails as a sex worker. She is a talented trapeze dancer and a full-service sex worker, but Ren loves being treated like she has value. After the plague, she reunites with Amanda, but they are kidnapped by the Painballers. Ren helps Toby save Amanda, and she will do anything to protect Amanda and help her heal from the trauma, just as Amanda was Ren’s protector as a child. Ren has been in love with Jimmy for years, after he had sex with her and broke her heart in high school, and she devotes herself to helping him recover too. Ren is unselfish and unenvious, not allowing the knowledge that Amanda once dated Jimmy or that Lotis Blue was Jimmy’s high school crush stand in the way of their friendships. Ren discovers that she’s pregnant with what must be a Craker baby, but she is still more concerned about Amanda’s pregnancy and her fears that she might be carrying a Painballer’s child. Ren gives birth to a Craker baby named Jimadam for Jimmy and Adam.

Before the plague, Amanda is a pleebrat in a group of friends who impresses Ren by stealing something for her. It’s surprising when Ren asks her to live with the Gardeners, and Amanda agrees. She even makes the effort to fit in, although she is more worldly than the other kids, which often comes out in humorous ways. She is tight-lipped about her life story, but she has always been strong and confident, protecting Ren like a sister. However, Amanda’s experience with the Painballers traumatizes her. She doesn’t share details, but the Painballers would have brutalized her and raped her repeatedly. Considering Amanda’s pleebrat toughness, the extent of her trauma response suggests that it was extreme. For most of the novel, Amanda barely speaks. She allows Ren and Lotis Blue to take care of her, and she simply follows them silently. She has a moment of semi-liveliness when she takes on the task of killing slugs, finding something cathartic in it, but her depression deepens when she finds out she’s pregnant. The Craker women purr on her frequently, and eventually she starts to enjoy their attention. When the two Painballers are finally executed, the heaviness of the trauma seems to lift from Amanda, and she is herself again. She gives birth to a Craker baby, whom she names Pilaren, after Pilar and Ren.

Jimmy is the protagonist of the first book, Oryx and Crake, and he spends much of this book unconscious, but he is a significant figure regardless. Jimmy is an ordinary person who is thrust into an extraordinary life because of his friendship with Glenn, or Crake. Jimmy is intelligent, but his talents are with words, not science. He undoubtedly would have taken the BlyssPluss pills if he hadn’t had Crake’s recommendation to avoid them, not to mention the inoculation that Crake slipped him. Like the others, he grew up with parents who were emotionally distant—a father who gave him a pet rakunk (a raccoon/skunk hybrid) and a mother who left them and took his rakunk to be released in the wild. He has always loved unavailable women, romanticizing their unavailability and breaking the hearts of available ones, such as Ren. He loved Oryx, but part of his love was convincing himself that he was finally obtaining the unavailable girl in the picture he carried with him through the first novel. Crake made him the sole caretaker of the Crakers. After the plague, he chose the name Snowman, short for Abominable Snowman, as an act of defiance because Crake didn’t allow mythical creatures as code names, only extinct ones. While Jimmy is unconscious, the Crakers keep a constant vigil because Jimmy is important to them. In the final battle, Jimmy sacrifices himself to save Toby.

The Crakers all have names taken from famous historical figures, a joke from Crake about the people he’s making who (he thinks) won’t have a sense of history. Blackbeard, named for a murderous pirate, is a sweet, smart young Craker boy who is curious about Toby and takes a liking to her. He follows her around and asks questions, and Toby ends up teaching him how to write, but Blackbeard turns out to have things to teach Toby too, including the answer to the mystery of the Crakers’ odd singing, which allows them to speak to animals. Blackbeard serves as the translator between the pigoons and the humans, and he bravely goes into battle with them to help the two groups communicate. As he grows up, his reading and writing improve quickly, and he takes on Toby’s role as storyteller, ultimately writing and maintaining the Book that includes all their stories. He teaches the others how to read and write, turning an oral tradition into a written one.

Swift Fox is one of the MaddAddamites, once a top geneticist in her field and a forced worker on the Paradice Project. She is young and attractive, and Toby is bothered by her unabashed sexuality, her revealing clothing, and her seeming determination to have sex with all the men as she conducts what she calls a genetic experiment. Toby’s irritation is her fear that Zeb will choose Swift Fox over her, or that he is sleeping with both of them. Since the narrative is from Toby’s perspective, the descriptions of Swift Fox may be biased, but Swift Fox does direct her flirting at Zeb, and it’s never clear whether Zeb gives in to her seductions. Before the plague, Swift Fox would have been fighting for her colleagues to take her seriously as a woman, but now that all of that is over, she speaks brashly and dresses seductively, flirting with all the men. She is the first to deliberately have sex with Craker men, and she ends up pregnant with twins. Later, she takes part in a full Craker mating ritual, ending up pregnant, and after Toby’s death, she promises to name her baby Toby if it’s a girl. It’s possible that this suggests that Swift Fox has genuine affection for Toby that Toby couldn’t see, but it’s also possible that this is a final way of grabbing attention from Toby.

Adam, also called Adam One, is a significant character in the second book as the founder of the God’s Gardeners. In The Year of the Flood, Adam seems pious and wise, his judgment infallible as he leads his flock. In MaddAddam, Zeb reveals that Adam is his brother, though a later DNA test reveals they are not actually related. They grew up in an abusive home where Adam was the golden child, and they eventually escaped together, separating for safety purposes but connecting when possible. Adam inherited his father’s magnetism and ability to attract followers, but he is determined to be completely good to avoid being like his father the Rev. His church is the opposite of his father’s church and based on strict environmentalism. Sometimes Zeb functions as his henchman, carrying out actions that Adam feels he can’t, such as killing their father. Adam is smart and always several steps ahead of any action he sets in motion. Incongruently, Adam is in love with Katrina Wu, the beautiful founder of Scales and Tails, and she is the elusive Eve One, though she died before he had a chance to bring her to the Garden. Zeb has been searching for him, and he turns out to have been kidnapped by the Painballers. When the Painballers start trying to negotiate a trade that includes all their guns and ammunition as well as Toby, Adam sacrifices himself rather than be used as a pawn that might lead to any cooperation with the Painballers. His last words are telling Zeb that he wouldn’t have lasted long anyways, which suggests the wound on his foot the pigoons smell when they track him may have been fatal.

Before the Corps took over the sex market, Katrina Wu (known as Katrina WooWoo to Zeb, who found her attractive) was a pioneer in the industry with Scales and Tails, a high-class but seedy experience in the pleeblands with beautiful, talented girls dressed as exotic birds and snakes. Zeb first met her as a magician’s assistant, and she rebuffed his advances before they started, running off before long to start her club. Zeb is shocked to meet her again as an ally to Adam, though Adam doesn’t tell her every secret. After Zeb causes the Rev to dissolve, Katrina handles the cleanup and aftermath, following Adam’s instructions and lying smoothly to the Rev’s oilcorp friends who are waiting for him to come back from his full-service experience in a private room. Zeb stops trying to sleep with Katrina because he realizes that Adam is incongruously in love with her. The novel doesn’t reveal whether Katrina loves him back, or if they are together, but Zeb says that she was Eve One, and Adam was planning to bring her to the Garden, although Katrina wouldn’t have appreciated Gardener fashion. However, Katrina is killed by the Corps who seize control of sex work, and Adam is devastated.

The Rev is Adam and Zeb’s father, though Zeb later discovers that he isn’t Zeb’s biological father. He is extremely abusive to his sons, and he killed and buried his first wife, Adam’s mother, spreading the story that she ran off to be promiscuous. The Rev started the Church of PetrOleum, which is centered on oil and the use of oil and fossil fuels as a right of the righteous. In private, he embezzles from his church and indulges in expensive, realistic violent pornography. When his sons escape his house, Zeb steals his embezzled funds, threatening to send the evidence of Zeb’s embezzlement to the church if he came after them. The Rev is the reason (at first) Adam and Zeb are on the run and hiding their identities. After the Rev tries to have him killed, Zeb sends the evidence, but the Rev is acquitted at trial and wins his church back with a tearful confession and apology. Zeb kills the Rev by slipping him pills with bioforms embedded, giving him multiple types to be sure it works. He’s shocked when the three pills together cause the Rev to liquify and dissolve into bloody foam.

Toby met Rebecca when they worked at SecretBurgers in The Year of the Flood. She’s too old to attract the attention of Blanco, the sadistic rapist manager, but she warns Toby. After Blanco starts assaulting Toby, Rebecca disappears one day, and she sends the God’s Gardeners to save her. Rebecca is the chef for the God’s Gardeners and then for the survivors. She is talented at making edible food out of strange and scavenged ingredients. Rebecca is the only one who laments the loss of pigoon meat, at least out loud, and she’s willing to cook the piglet that Toby decides they should bury. She volunteers to join in the battle at first but quickly changes her mind when Zeb reminds them all to really think about whether they can keep up with the rest.

One of the MaddAddamites, Lotis Blue is an attractive young woman who befriends Amanda and Ren and helps Ren take care of Amanda when she’s too traumatized to bathe and eat. She and Ren build the additions to the cobb house together. When Jimmy first wakes up, Lotis Blue reveals casually to Toby that she, like Ren and Amanda, also once knew Jimmy. They were lab partners at HelthWyzer High, and he’d had a crush on her, but her father had been transferred, so she had moved away. Her real name is Wakulla Price, which Ren laughingly recognizes as the name of the ex-girlfriend Jimmy invented as the culprit who shattered his heart and made him unable to love. Lotis Blue still helps Ren with Jimmy’s recovery, and the three women are friends with no jealousy or bad blood between them.

Crake is dead before the action of the third book starts, and he exists in flashbacks and as the central figure and deity in the Crakers’ stories. He was a brilliant, arrogant boy who believed he could design a better human. Then, he unleashed a plague to give his redesigned humans their own world and eradicate the evils of the previous human race. He was a part of the MaddAddam community until he turned on them to get the Corps to force them into his service, at least the ones who were scientific geniuses. Crake liked games, and he would demand a rematch if he lost because he didn’t like to lose. The justification for his actions has some room for debate since the human race was quickly killing itself and the planet, and much of humanity was a corrupted, violent sewer of apathy. However, Crake lacked empathy, and near-extinction-level mass murder is rarely the right choice. Crake’s ideal world would get rid of art, culture, and emotions, only keeping the utilitarian. In the third book, Zeb reveals that Pilar had willed the chess set with the remaining bioform-vector pills hidden in the bishop to Glenn, and Adam agreed that they should honor her wishes, suggesting that Adam and Pilar knew—or even suggested in the letter—what Glenn would do with the pills, meaning that their preparation of the Gardeners was with the knowledge of a forthcoming event. Crake’s final stage was to kill Oryx in front of Jimmy so he would kill Crake. Jimmy despises Crake and hates that the Crakers worship him as their creator.

Oryx is an enigmatic character who was given a MaddAddam name, but no one knew her real name or where she came from. Crake found her through a sex work service for students that would find sex workers to certain physical specifications. Jimmy is convinced that Oryx is the grown-up little girl he saw being sexually abused in pornography when he was younger and carried a photo of her face through the first novel. She claims that she isn’t and that he didn’t see her again on the news for being trafficked. She is supposedly Crake’s girlfriend, but she is also sleeping with Jimmy, and she is vague about the nature of her relationship with Crake. It’s even possible that Crake hired her to be with Jimmy, but it’s never clear. After meeting her through the service, Crake hired her to work with the Crakers. She teaches them and tells them stories, and those who remember being in the dome remember and love her. The Crakers believe she made all the animals, and they worship her as a sort of secondary god to Crake.