Let's retreat even further in time and test your patience. Because it is entertaining to imagine anyone is reading this and that you are on tenterhooks to see where I am going with this.
I read Dorothy Lessing's The Golden Notebook in high school (y'know, as normal learners spend their free time) and adored it. It opened up a new world of politicised literature for me, as a natural and nurtured feminist, although I didn't know where to find more of the same or how to exercise it.
Later I would read AS Byatt and fall in love for the same reason - together with her representation of the post-Modern psyche: by definition ultimately and completely apathetic. The last few pages of Possession sealed the deal.
Around this time, a friend was surprised that I hadn't yet read any Margaret Atwood. 'As a feminist of your own devising, I would think you would have devoured her work.' (Or something as cultured.) I am otherwise like that, as you know (as above), so I didn't read any just because he said I should (a reflection on our friendship, too). Until, while rooting around in my collection of books, I found the book and couldn't resist those deckle edges (they get me every time).
I was ambivalent. I was also confused. I was ambivalent because I was confused. The ideas of Oryx and Crake rooted around in the recesses of my brain and unravelled things I did not want to see in the dark of an alley or in the light of day. (An older me is more comfortable in alleys than sunlight.) So I ravelled those things up again while Oryx, Crake and Snowman-the-Jimmy weren't looking, and packed those three characters along with them.
Burying them didn't help. They kept popping up in my mind, while I was thinking about genetically modified anything (not often), overgrown grass (more often than you'd think), apocalypse (very often), the destructiveness of the human species (very, very often) and things that have little to do with the book, like apples. Each time, I would wander down one of the many paths in that greenhouse and whisk myself out when I realised what half of me was doing while the other half wasn't looking.
Excuse the pun but it grew on me (actually, don't excuse me - that's a pretty good one). One day I realised that other half have shoved my dislike over onto the 'like' side and closer to 'craving'. Muttering under my breath, I read others, like The Blind Assassin and The Handmaid's Tale. To be honest, I can't remember what any of them are about. They weren't Oryx and Crake. They were too packed with ideas and my brain kept overheating (it does that. Even a bibliophile has limits).
Lucky me, Oryx and Crake was about to become... wait for it... a trilogy. Even an author needs to make money. Thank you, JRR Tolkien. Again, I was ambivalent. I don't like being coerced into spending my money (although, let's be honest, that's how capitalism works). But I craved more.
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Conundrum aside, I am halfway through. This book knits together the two stories, in a different narrative style: one character takes centre stage. His story is told as a story to his lover who turns it into a (almost Biblical) story for a species of not-but-almost-human beings, who are depicted as childlike in their ignorance but are probably better suited to the world, honestly.
All of these stories tell the story of how pre-pandemic society became further divided than ours (pre-pre-pandemic) into haves and have-nots, both brainwashed (sometimes violently) into maintaining the status quo. Except, as we all know, sometimes wolves make their way into the herd and these wolves were called the MaddAddamites, and named themselves after animals we have made extinct. Whatever, because the pandemic happened and now they're telling stories in the aftermath.
No spoilers there, I promise.
I haven't finished the book so cart - horse, y'know, but based on The Year of the Flood, there is none of the same crypticness and magic of Oryx and Crake. That book punched me in my stomach, because Snowman-the-Jimmy's story was impossible to fully untangle. It also ended with another punch that physically made me blink and try to block the memory out. Although there have been moments of unveiling, where clues have fitted together, there hasn't been the same kind of (almost Biblical) revelation.
That said, I can't get enough of Zeb's story in MaddAddam, where he (so far) plays an incidental role in the pandemic, although we already know he is critical after it. (It's always the people prepared to hit under the belt that survive in a pandemic. Remember this, peeps, when you play guns and crossbows in your minds.) This is exactly the reason I am slowplaying my reading. (No, not to learn how to use a crossbow, because I am comfortable with the under-the-belt people doing it for me.) Because, based on my experience of Oryx and Crake, I will have to manage the craving after I have put it down.
Forget the apocalypse, this is a far more important (and imminent) problem.
All of the books are narratives within narratives: told first by the character (almost self-consciously because they are pretty much telling their stories to themselves, old loud, which is not considered crazy in an apocalypse), and then revised for an audience, even if we aren't always privy to the telling. Although AS Byatt hits - nail - head with Possession about post-Modern society, universally people enjoy stories. In a story, you are the maker of your own destiny.
Stories lead you into the garage of your mind, to topple the piles of things you prefer to ignore. That may be as damaging in the lead-up to a pandemic than how it is executed. With stories, and in the toppling, we imagine the means of our destruction into being.
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