Oryx and Crake ends as Jimmy is trying to decide whether or not he can trust the three human stragglers he has stumbled across. Perhaps they might be his friends; on the other hand, perhaps they will be fatal to the Crakers. What to do?

  * * *

  —

  The Year of the Flood follows the path of Toby, rescued by Adam One and the God’s Gardeners from a hideous life entangled with slum crime and SecretBurgers (nobody knows what’s in them); and also of Ren, one-time underaged girlfriend of Jimmy. Each has survived the “Waterless Flood”—Gardener code name for the viral pandemic: Ren holed up in Scales and Tails, the upmarket sex club where she’s been working, and Toby barricaded into the AnooYoo Spa in the Park, where she’s been working under an assumed name after the Gardeners have been outlawed. The Year of the Flood brings Toby and Ren onto the scene just as Jimmy, addled by his infected foot, is trying to decide whether to shoot or not, and ends several hours after that. The moon is rising, the evil Painballers are roped to a tree, securely, we hope; the Crakers are approaching, the hostile pigoons roam the forest. What next? we wonder.

  MaddAddam tells us what next.

  * * *

  —

  Those are the reasons within the books themselves; they have to do with story, and the unfairness of leaving stories unfinished unless you intend to tell more. I grew up reading Sherlock Holmes, and I always wanted just one more story about him; which is probably why people are still writing those stories, long after the original author died.

  But there are other reasons for writing books—ones that have to do with content rather than plot. We live in extraordinary times: on the one hand, technologies of all sorts—biological, robotic, digital—are being invented and perfected by the minute, and many feats that would once have been considered impossible or magical are being performed. On the other hand, we are destroying our biological home at breathtaking speed. On the third hand (for there’s always a hidden hand), the democratic form of government we have extolled and promoted in the West for centuries is being undermined from within by super-surveillance technologies and the power of corporate money. When 1 per cent of the population controls over 80 per cent of the wealth, you have a top-heavy social pyramid that’s inherently unstable.

  This is the world we already live in. The MaddAddam trilogy builds it out a little further, and then explores it. We already have the tools to create the MaddAddam world. But will we use them?

  Seven Gothic Tales

  INTRODUCTION

  (2013)

  On the Danish fifty-krone banknote there’s a portrait of Isak Dinesen. It’s signed Karen Blixen, which is how she is known in Denmark. She’s shown at the age of sixty or so, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a fur collar and looking very glamorous indeed.

  I first saw Isak Dinesen when I was ten, in a photo shoot in Life magazine. My experience then was similar to that of Sara Stambaugh, one of her bio-critics: “I well remember my own excitement around 1950, when, leafing through a used copy of Life magazine, I stumbled across an article on the Danish Baroness Karen Blixen, her identity not simply revealed but celebrated in big, glossy black-and-white photographs. I still remember one in particular, showing her leaning dramatically from a window, striking, turbaned, and emaciated.”

  To my young eyes, this person in the pictures was like a magical creature from a fairy tale: an impossibly aged woman, a thousand years old at least. Her outfits were striking and the makeup of the era had been carefully applied, but the effect was carnivalesque—like a dressed-up Mexican skeleton. Her expression, however, was bright-eyed and ironic: she seemed to be enjoying the show-stopping if not grotesque impression she was making.

  Could Isak Dinesen have been contemplating such a moment in Seven Gothic Tales, twenty-five years earlier? In the story “The Supper at Elsinore,” the de Coninck siblings are described as living memento mori: “…as you got, from the face of the brother, the key of understanding to this particular type of family beauty, you would recognize it at once in the appearance of the sisters, even in the two youthful portraits on the wall. The most striking characteristic in the three heads was the generic resemblance to the skull.”

  Isak Dinesen was already ill at the time of the 1950 pictures. Nine years later she made a final triumphant visit to New York. She was lionized; famous writers paid homage to her, including E.E. Cummings and Arthur Miller; her public appearances were packed; and there were more photos. Less than three years later she was dead, as she must have known she would be. Her flamboyant self-presentation takes on, in retrospect, a new meaning: in her place, other doomed sufferers might have stayed in seclusion, concealing from the camera the wreckage of a once-striking beauty, but instead Dinesen chose the full public spotlight. Was she incarnating one of her own dominant literary motifs—the brave but futile gesture in the face of almost certain death? It’s tempting to think so.

  New York was a fitting choice for her swan song, since it was New York that had made her famous back in 1934 when Seven Gothic Tales took America by storm. Rejected by several publishers for the usual reasons—short stories didn’t sell, the author was unknown, the stories themselves were odd and not attuned to the zeitgeist—the book was finally picked up by a smaller American publisher, Harrison Smith and Robert Haas. There were conditions: the well-known novelist Dorothy Canfield must write an introduction, and the author was to receive no advance. Karen Blixen gambled and took the offer. Then she won, for, much to the surprise of all, Seven Gothic Tales was chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club, which was a guarantee of wide publicity and large sales.

  Now it was time for Karen Blixen to make her own condition: she would publish under a nom de plume, Isak Dinesen. Dinesen was her maiden name, Isak was the Danish version of Isaac, “laughter,” the name picked by the elderly Sarah in the Book of Genesis for her late and unexpected child. Blixen’s American publisher tried to talk her out of using a pseudonym, but to no avail: she was determined to be multiple. (And, by the way, male, or at least genderless. Perhaps she did not wish to be thrust into the Lady Scribbler cage, suggestive of lesser merit.)

  “Isak” was appropriate: Karen Blixen’s emergence as a writer was indeed late and unexpected. She’d returned from Africa to Denmark in 1931, stony flat broke—her marriage was finished, her African coffee farm had failed, her romantic lover, big-game hunter Denys Finch Hatton, had died in a plane crash. Although she’d written much earlier—her first stories were published when she was barely twenty—she’d chosen marriage and Africa over writing; but that life was now finished. At forty-six, she must have been feeling both desolate and desperate; but also, evidently, boiling with creative energy.

  The stories in Seven Gothic Tales were written at speed and under pressure. They were also written in English: one reason usually given was that she felt English would be more practical than Danish, since many more potential readers spoke it. But there were surely some deeper motives. Blixen herself was fluent in English; so what, we might ask, could she have been reading in English during her formative years? What, that is, might have led her to write “tales” rather than “stories”? Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales? Old wives’ tales? Fairy tales? The Winter’s Tale, the Shakespeare play that lent its name to a later Dinesen collection?

  The distinction between the two forms was well understood in Victorian times. In a “tale,” a woman may change into a monkey before our very eyes, as one does in the Dinesen tale “The Monkey”; in a mainline short story, she cannot.

  “Tales” have tellers and listeners within them, much more frequently than realistic stories do. The most famous tale-spinner of all is Scheherazade, narrating to stave off death, and that is the very first storytelling situation Dinesen offers us. In “The Deluge at Norderney,” a courageous group of aristocrats who have chosen to exchange places with a small peasant family waits out the night while a flood rises around them, telling stories to encourage one another and pass the time. Perhaps a boat will arrive at dawn to rescue them; perhaps they will be swept away first. Dinesen ends her story thus:

  Between the boards a strip of fresh deep blue was showing, against which the little lamp seemed to make a red stain. The dawn was breaking.

  The old woman slowly drew her fingers out of the man’s hand, and placed one upon her lips.

  “À ce moment de sa narration,” she said, “Scheherazade vit paraître le matin, et, discrète, se tut.”

  Seven Gothic Tales is filled with storytellers, and also with the kind of fractal exfoliation and multi-chambering structures so abundantly typical of more ancient tales, such as those in The Thousand and One Nights and Boccaccio’s Decameron. There is a “frame”—a couple of men on a boat, for instance, whiling away the time by telling about their lives, as in “The Dreamers”; then one of those stories leads into another, told by yet another person within it, which opens up into another, which then links back to the first, and so on. As with Scheherazade, much of this tale-telling (and indeed much of the action in the tales recounted) takes place at night.

  But Seven Gothic Tales also echoed a more recent period in which writers drew upon these older-time forms of tale-telling. Karen Blixen was born in 1885, three years after Robert Louis Stevenson published his first collection, New Arabian Nights. That moment ushered in a rich period of late Victorian and Edwardian tale-telling, in both short and long forms, that stretched to the outbreak of the First World War. Not only Stevenson, but Arthur Conan Doyle, M.R. James, the Henry James of The Turn of the Screw and “The Jolly Corner,” the Oscar Wilde of The Picture of Dorian Gray, the early H.G. Wells of The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau, Bram Stoker of Dracula, the H. Rider Haggard of She, the George du Maurier of Trilby, and a host of other English-language tale-spinners engaged with ghosts and possession and the uncanny were energetically publishing in those years. Borges, Calvino, and Ray Bradbury, among others, drank from the same well.

  Stevenson was possibly the most important of these for Dinesen. She kept a collected edition of his work in her library, and alludes to him overtly in the story “The Dreamers” by naming one of her characters, Olalla, after one of his. That particular story plays with many other motifs from the tale-telling tradition, not all of them English: the heroine of multiple identities, as in The Tales of Hoffman; the dark enchanter, a mirror reversal of the Svengali figure in Trilby, linked with an opera singer who has lost her voice.

  Two motifs from Stevenson’s early work are particularly dominant throughout Seven Gothic Tales: the courageous act or last throw of the dice in the face of impending doom, as in (to give only one instance) Stevenson’s “The Pavilion on the Links”; and the controlling older person manipulating the sexual destinies of the young, as in his “The Sire de Maletroit’s Door.” In Stevenson’s stories all turns out well, but in Dinesen’s variants things do not go so smoothly. In “The Poet,” the old arranger gets shot and bashed to death by the two young innamorati with whose fates he has been playing, and who will now face execution themselves; in “The Monkey,” a marriage designed to cloak homosexuality is forced, not only by rape, but by a horrifying metempsychosis; in “The Roads Round Pisa,” the old arranger is deceived into fighting an unnecessary duel, then dies of a heart attack from the stress. In “The Deluge at Norderney,” the marriage arranged by the elderly Baroness is not only invalid—the officiating Cardinal being in fact another person entirely—but all the participants may soon perish. Dinesen affirms the Romantic through her insistence on the spiritual validity of honour, but she also subverts it. Not so fast with the happy endings, she seems to be telling us.

  As with the stories in New Arabian Nights, and indeed as with modern “Romantic” conventions, many of Dinesen’s tales are placed long ago and far away; but whereas with Stevenson the choice was primarily aesthetic, for Dinesen there is another layer of significance. For she was gazing back at that late Victorian and Edwardian golden age of tale-telling across a vast gulf: not only the years during which her own earlier life had ended up as wreckage, but also the First World War, which had smashed the social fabric of belief, status, and social convention that had held sway in the two centuries before it.

  Dinesen can see that vanished country. She describes it in minute and loving detail, even the more unpleasant sides of it—the provincialism, the snobbery, the inturned, stifled lives—but she can’t return to it except through storytelling. It’s lost to all but words. There’s a vein of stoic, clear-eyed nostalgia running through her work, and, despite the ironic distance she often assumes, the elegiac tone is never far away.

  Nevertheless, what pleasure she must have felt in the process; and what pleasure she has provided for her many readers, over time. Seven Gothic Tales is the opening act of a remarkable writing career, one that placed Isak Dinesen on the list of essential twentieth-century authors. As James Joyce invokes Daedalus the maze-maker at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—“Old father, old artificer”—so many readers and writers might invoke Isak Dinesen: “Old mother, old tale-spinner, stand me now and ever in good stead.”

  And from those Life magazine photographs, her enigmatic, ornamented skeleton self with the living eyes gallantly returns our gaze.

  Doctor Sleep

  (2013)

  Doctor Sleep is Stephen King’s latest novel, and it’s a very good specimen of the quintessential King blend. According to Vladimir Nabokov, Salvador Dalí was “really Norman Rockwell’s twin brother kidnapped by gypsies in babyhood.” But actually there were triplets: the third one is Stephen King.

  The Rockwell small-town rocking chair, the old-fashioned house with the welcome mat, the genial family doctor, the grandfather clock: there they are, depicted in all their lifelike, apparently cozy detail. Both Rockwell and King know such details intimately, right down to the brand names. But there’s something very, very wrong. The rocking chair is coming to get you. The family doctor is greenish in hue and has been dead for some time. The house is haunted, and the welcome mat is alive with things. And, pace Dalí, the clock is melting.

  Doctor Sleep picks up on the story of Danny, the little boy with psycho-intuitive powers in King’s famous 1977 novel, The Shining. Danny survived both his evil-infested dad, Jack Torrance, and the ghouls that inhabited the grisly Overlook Hotel in Colorado, escaping by the hair of his chinny-chin-chin just before the clock struck midnight and the hotel’s infernal boiler blew up, incinerating the forces of bad and leaving readers hiding under the bed but cross-eyed with relief.

  In Doctor Sleep, Dan has grown up, but he retains his “shining” abilities. Having wrestled the Demon Drink to an uneasy standstill—his father had that problem too, as we recall—he’s attending AA and working at a palliative care facility, where, with his mind-probing talents, he helps the dying to reconcile themselves to their often misspent lives. Thus his nickname, Doctor Sleep, which echoes his childhood nickname, “doc.” (As in the “What’s up?” of Bugs Bunny fame. What, indeed?)

  Enter another magic child, Abra—as in “cadabra,” as the text helpfully points out—who’s even better at the shining stuff than Dan is. She alarmed her parents early on by predicting the 9/11 disaster while still in her crib, and has since caused dismay by sticking all the spoons to the ceiling during her birthday party.

  The two shiners soon find themselves in spiritual communication, which is a lucky thing because young Abra is going to need big help. She is the target of a rackety, entertaining bunch called the True Knot, who lust to drink her spiritual mist, or “Steam.” (This is a whole new twist on steampunk.) The Knot members have been alive for a Very Long Time—not usually a good sign, as those who know their Dracula and She can testify—and, disguised as vacationers roaming the countryside in RVs, they kidnap and torture their victims, then imbibe their essences. They also bottle these in case of shortages; for if they run out of Steam they evaporate, leaving their clothes behind them, like the Wicked Witch of the West when melted.

  They’re led by a beautiful woman named Rose the Hat, whose main lover is a gent known as Crow Daddy. (From crawdaddy, we assume. King loves wordplay and puns and mirror language: remember redrum, from The Shining? Who could forget?) The names of King’s characters are frequently appropriate: Dan “Lions’ Den” Anthony (the tempted saint) Torrance (it never rains but it pours) is a case in point. Rose is a sinister Rosa Mystica, a negative version of the Virgin Mary. (For starters, she ain’t no virgin.)

  As for the Overlook Hotel—on the site of which the True Knotters have pitched their main encampment—its name has at least three layers: the obvious one (it looks out over the landscape), the semi-obvious (the bad folks overlook something), and the deeply embedded, which I’m guessing has to do with the old song about the four-leafed clover and the somebody I adore; for King’s good and evil arrangement is usually yin and yang, with a spot of darkness in every goodie and a tiny ray of sunshine in every baddie. Even the True Knotters are sweet with one another, though their status as human beings is dubious. As one new recruit says, “Am I still human?” And as Rose replies, “Do you care?”