Reality bites back

After the end there is a new beginning. Maddaddam, the last book in Margaret Atwood's trilogy of post-apocalyptic romances, chronicles the fall of humanity as we know it and sets the stage for a new world populated by humanoid creatures, the Crakers (bioengineered by scientist Crake in the first book).

Perfect and naive, they learn about their origins and their creator from the last of the humans in a series of vivid flashbacks interspersed with exciting passages of their present fight for survival.

The novel has a biblical tone, but the oral history as told by Toby, the central human character, is infused with Atwood's wit, humour and sense of the ridiculous. To the Crakers, with their perfect teeth, uninhibited sexuality and respect for all living things, their creator is god - even though Crake has wiped out most of his own race with a deadly biogenetic plague. The Crakers are his hope for a perfect humanity, free from the evils of humankind.

Many of the characters known from the previous two tomes, Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, reappear. Crake and Oryx are dead, but Jimmy-the-Snowman, Crake's sidekick, is found wandering in a dwaal. He is also sanctified by the Crakers as the previous narrator of their origins. ''Oh f**k" becomes a reference to Jimmy-the Snowman's own invisible sidekick, who is called upon to help in times of crisis - a running joke shared between the reader and the humans in the story, and one the naive Crakers are unaware of.

There are lots of in jokes in Atwood's impressively imagined dystopia - not least the suggestion that the beliefs we hold about our origins are as daft as the ones that Toby makes up for the Crakers. Commenting on Toby's and her own role as myth-maker, historical commentator and storyteller, Atwood writes: ''There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story, which is part of the story too."

Every story needs a hero, and in Maddaddam the hero is Zeb, Toby's lover in the guarded compound where the survivors of the plague must defend themselves against the Painballers, the brutal winners of a reality television show that pits vicious murderers against each other until only one is left standing. Toby recounts Zeb's upbringing by the evil Rev of the Church of PetrOleum, his escape and flight into the ''pleebands" (slums) with his brother Adam One, and the creation of the underground resistance group, the MaddAddamites.

Atwood convincingly employs her talent to build a future that's a plausible trajectory of our world. Helth Wyzer, a huge corporation of biogeneticists that control human wellbeing by creating bio-engineered animals and drugs, are the new government.

Both a cautionary tale and a story of hope, in Maddaddam Atwood imagines a believable destiny for humankind ''[who] cannot understand what they are doing to the sea and the sky and the plants and the animals. [Who] cannot understand that they are killing them, and they will end by killing themselves".

• Maddaddam is published by Bloomsbury. At Exclusive Books for R304