Some hope in a hell of an ending

When posterity reviews the art produced in the early years of the 21st century, it will be hard to miss the number of dystopian narratives proclaiming that it's the end of the world as we know it. Whether you enjoy popular entertainment such as The Hunger Games or more literary fare like Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the apocalypse is never far away. And if a plague, ice cap or stock market crash doesn't get you, then the zombies surely will.

MaddAddam, Margaret Atwood's 22nd novel, both participates in this noble tradition and pre-empts its modern resurgence. For one thing, it is the third part of a trilogy that began in 2003 with Oryx and Crake, and continued six years later with The Year of the Flood. Being smarter than the average novelist, Atwood knows her place in the scheme of things and plays along accordingly: "Speculations about what the world would be like after human control of it ended had been - long ago, briefly - a queasy form of popular entertainment."

Atwood has never been one to ignore the claims of popular entertainment, however queasy. At the same time, this is a writer whose career - fiction, poetry, non-fiction or children's stories - deserves to stand alongside any writer of the past half century. Read together, Atwood's triptych comprises a brightly coloured 21st-century epic. Only, MaddAddam doesn't "sing of arms and a man", but of arms, a man, a woman, a small community of humans (Snowman-the-Jimmy), Amanda, Ren), vast herds of genetically created pigs, a race of innocent humanoids bred in a laboratory, and a band of renegade psychopaths hoping to defile all of the above.

The plot is rudimentary, but in its final stages tense and exciting. A band of rag-tag survivors have outlasted a global pandemic sent to cleanse the planet of mankind once and for all. Atwood's misfits forage, cook, bicker, reminisce about decent coffee, have sex, hold secret crushes, and try desperately not to die. There are many ways this can be accomplished. There are monster Pigoons (part Homer, part Orwell) who rage whenever one of their number ends up in a bacon sandwich. Even worse are the "Painballers": rogue psychopaths who have found superstardom through a sport that makes Rollerball look like Crown Green Bowling.

After an entente cordiale with the hogs, the tribe declares war on the Painballers. The final conflict takes place, with ironic symmetry, at the Egg, the laboratory in which the Crakes were conceived. Atwood's characters come full circle, but whereas book one was concerned with birth and re-birth, MaddAddam has a death-soaked sense of an ending.

Anyone whose memory of Oryx and Crake is either foggy or even non-existent need not despair. Atwood opens with a handy recap that parodies long-running TV series ("The story so far") and the chapter summaries of 18th-century fiction: "The story of the Egg, and of Oryx and Crake, and how they made People and Animals …" This précis does more than make MaddAddam accessible to readers unaware of Oryx and Crake. It introduces Atwood's diverse modes of narration. MaddAddam's action and characters are presented and re-presented in a series of self-consciously dramatised storytelling sessions - with a teller and an audience - that marry the directness of oral traditions to Atwood's characteristically robust prose.

MaddAddam both completes the series, and remixes its opening episodes, which is apt as motifs of storytelling, splicing, origins and endings run throughout Atwood's new work. The longest sections are told by our hero, Zeb, to our heroine, Toby. These accounts of his life and adventures become a kind of love story. Not that Zeb's subject is romance: he's keener on sex, his cult-leading father, his brother Adam, and his life as a computer hacker. Instead, these intimate acts of confession and revelation help bring Zed and Toby together after years spent flirting too subtly for their own good.