If you’ve never heard of Margaret Atwood, you’re missing out. Perhaps most famous for her dystopian fertility horror story The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood has long since proved she’s got a grip on writing literary masterpieces – and futuristic, terrifying, dystopian worlds while we’re at it. If you come across lists of sci-fi novel recommendations, more often than not Oryx and Crake has pride of place – in fact, that’s probably how I heard of it in the first place. And, of course, the Waterstones shop worker told me she liked it. One day I’ll buy a book that one of those shop workers hasn’t read, but I’m still waiting for that day.
I knew Oryx and Crake was going to be good (shortlisted for the Booker AND Orange Prize, not bad), but going from the blurb, I was slightly worried it would be one of thsoe odd, experimental, sci-fi works that takes a while to get your teeth into. You tell me:
‘Pigs might not fly but they are strangely altered. So, for that matter, are wolves and raccoons. A man, once called Jimmy, lives in a tree, wrapped in old bedsheets, now calls himself Snowman. The voice of Oryx, the woman he loved, teasingly haunts him. And the green-eyed Children of Crake are, for some reason, his responsibility.’
Yeah, sounds pretty straightforward.
Thankfully, it was. The story was fairly clear from the start, bar the first chapter, which plunges you straight into ‘Snowman’s’ life – he’s recognisable to us, but his fellow humans seem to view him as something of a commodity, which was intriguing. The story is told through a mix of current events (so to speak) and flashbacks to Snowman’s (aka Jimmy’s) life, bringing the events to present day.
Jimmy’s the best protagonist I’ve read in a while. You despise him, love him, and, overall, pity him, all the way through his emotionally-starved childhood to the harrowing current events that unfold around him. It’s hard to tell how old he is when the book opens, but based on his life experiences I’d hazard a guess that he’s in his mid to late twenties. This is a spoilery review, but it’s a spoilery book (as are most books that open at the end).
The plot focuses on a world where gene experimentation is a common aspect of a futuristic, dystopian society, and one man – Crake – is left to run wild with his ideas. Jimmy grows up in an environment where animals are spliced together for human experimentation and, essentially, for fun. Crake (real name Glenn), his boyhood friend who matures into a genius, becomes so wrapped up in this that he eventually manufactures a new type of human – these, then, are the only ‘people’ left in the new world, who Jimmy refers to as the Crakers, or Children of Crake. The book is a Bildungsroman for Jimmy (and Crake, to a lesser extent), as we watch him grow into a world where commercialism is everything, women are prey to common and uncontrolled pornographic exploitation, and biological experimentation has been taken to the extreme. Of course, things don’t exactly improve when a plague wipes out civilisation.
You can probably guess who created the plague to (presumably) allow his self-created humans to thrive: Crake. Why he made Jimmy immune to the disease is unclear; he never properly explains it to his best friend, but his final lines to him – ‘I’m counting on you’ – seem to suggest he trusts Jimmy above everyone else to rebuild civilisation from the roots up. But why not himself? That, I hope, is something that may become clearer in the sequels. Is Crake a psychopath? It takes a certain amount of manic self-belief to believe you have the power to wipe out society and reconstruct it based on what you deem effective, and Crake shows little emotion about it (or about anything) throughout the novel. That said, the world he lives in is unpleasant. Even beyond the state interference, we are given hints as to exactly what the Earth has become. Global warming has left a huge proportion of the land underwater, and the weather seems overly freakish compared to now (there is a storm every afternoon, for example). If this is the catalyst for Crake’s Godlike plan, it’s disturbingly easy to see the logic behind it.
Considering Jimmy and Crake don’t spend that much time together after they leave high school (at least, until Jimmy goes to work for Crake), they have a remarkably captivating friendship. It’s helped, I suppose, by that uncertainty over whether or not they actually care for one another or rather are bonded by a sense of competition. This is heightened when Oryx comes into the equation; initially spotted as a child on a pornography website when the two of them were teenagers, they both develop lifelong obsessions with her until she makes an appearance in real life as Crake’s girlfriend (of a sort) and seduces Jimmy. It isn’t clear whether or not this was set up by Crake but Jimmy quickly falls in love and is desperate to prevent Crake from finding out. Of course, it’s suggested that he’s known all along (and it is part of his plan). Crake meets his own end by slitting Oryx’s throat in front of a gun-wielding Jimmy – it’s hard to believe he didn’t know what would happen as a result of that.
Oryx is not so interesting. She’s fairly non-descript in the book, and although we get a sense of her upbringing, we get no emotional depth from her; she seems virtually indifferent to what happened to her in her past. It was almost as if she didn’t need to be a fully fleshed out character but was simply there to be an object for both of the men to project their own, emotionally-stunted versions of love on to her. When a female writer writes these male-fantasy type women into novels I’m always surprised, but in this case I didn’t care too much. From what I know Atwood will focus on much more real and three-dimensional women in the sequel, so I’m looking forward to that.
Speaking of … the book is kicking off a trilogy. Oryx and Crake ends on a cliffhanger, but from what I’ve heard the next book doesn’t continue this plot but instead flashes back in time and looks at the same set of events through different characters’ eyes. This suggests that the controlled, dystopian world isn’t entirely left behind, which is intriguing – there are a few loose ends to be tied up (what happened to Jimmy’s mother, for example). I can’t wait.
This gets the full five stars from me; I could hardly put it down. Bring on The Year of the Flood.
[Coming next: We by Yevgeny Zamyatin]
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