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Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam Trilogy, Book 1) Kindle Edition
Snowman, known as Jimmy before mankind was overwhelmed by a plague, is struggling to survive in a world where he may be the last human, and mourning the loss of his best friend, Crake, and the beautiful and elusive Oryx whom they both loved. In search of answers, Snowman embarks on a journey—with the help of the green-eyed Children of Crake—through the lush wilderness that was so recently a great city, until powerful corporations took mankind on an uncontrolled genetic engineering ride. Margaret Atwood projects us into a near future that is both all too familiar and beyond our imagining.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherAnchor
- Publication dateMarch 30, 2004
- File size3295 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
While the story begins with a rather ponderous set-up of what has become a clichéd landscape of the human endgame, littered with smashed computers and abandoned buildings, it takes on life when Snowman recalls his boyhood meeting with his best friend Crake: "Crake had a thing about him even then.... He generated awe ... in his dark laconic clothing." A dangerous genius, Crake is the book's most intriguing character. Crake and Jimmy live with all the other smart, rich people in the Compounds--gated company towns owned by biotech corporations. (Ordinary folks are kept outside the gates in the chaotic "pleeblands.") Meanwhile, beautiful Oryx, raised as a child prostitute in Southeast Asia, finds her way to the West and meets Crake and Jimmy, setting up an inevitable love triangle. Eventually Crake's experiments in bioengineering cause humanity's shockingly quick demise (with uncanny echoes of SARS, ebola, and mad cow disease), leaving Snowman to try to pick up the pieces. There are a few speed bumps along the way, including some clunky dialogue and heavy-handed symbols such as Snowman's broken watch, but once the bleak narrative gets moving, as Snowman sets out in search of the laboratory that seeded the world's destruction, it clips along at a good pace, with a healthy dose of wry humor. --Mark Frutkin, Amazon.ca
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“Atwood has long since established herself as one of the best writers in English today, but Oryx and Crake may well be her best work yet. . . . Brilliant, provocative, sumptuous and downright terrifying.” —The Baltimore Sun
“Her shuddering post-apocalyptic vision of the world . . . summons up echoes of George Orwell, Anthony Burgess and Aldous Huxley. . . . Oryx and Crake[is] in the forefront of visionary fiction.” —The Seattle Times
“A book too marvelous to miss.” —The San Diego Union-Tribune
“Majestic. . . . Keeps us on the edges of our seats.” —The Washington Post
“A compelling futuristic vision. . . . Oryx and Crake carries itself with a refreshing lightness. . . . Its shrewd pacing neatly balances action and exposition. . . . What gives the book a deeper resonance is its humanity.” –Newsday
“[A] stunning new novel–possibly her best since The Handmaid’s Tale.” –Time Out New York
“A delightful amalgam for the sophisticated reader: her perfectly placed prose, poetic language and tongue-in-cheek tone are ubiquitous throughout, as if an enchanted nanny is telling one a dark bedtime story of alienation and ruin while lovingly stroking one’s head.” –Ms.
“Truly remarkable. . . . As fun as it is dark. . . . A feast of realism, science fiction, satire, elegy and then some. . . . Atwood has concocted here an all-too-possible vision. . . . [She is] a master.” –The News & Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina)
“A roll of dry, black, parodic laughter. . . . One of the year’s most surprising novels.” –The Economist
...
From the Inside Flap
Margaret Atwood s new novel is so utterly compelling, so prescient, so relevant, so terrifyingly-all-too-likely-to-be-true, that readers may find their view of the world forever changed after reading it.
This is Margaret Atwood at the absolute peak of her powers. For readers of Oryx and Crake, nothing will ever look the same again.
The narrator of Atwood's riveting novel calls himself Snowman. When the story opens, he is sleeping in a tree, wearing an old bedsheet, mourning the loss of his beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. He searches for supplies in a wasteland where insects proliferate and pigoons and wolvogs ravage the pleeblands, where ordinary people once lived, and the Compounds that sheltered the extraordinary. As he tries to piece together what has taken place, the narrativ
From the Back Cover
-Booklist (starred review)
“A landmark work of speculative fiction, comparable to A Clockwork Orange, Brave New World.… Atwood has surpassed herself.”
-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“[Oryx and Crake is written] with a style and grace that demonstrate again just how masterful a storyteller she is. If one measure of art’s power is its ability to force you to face what you would very much rather not, Oryx and Crake – the evocative tale of a nightmarish near-future – is an extraordinary work of art, one that reaffirms Atwood’s place at the apex of Canadian literature.”
–Maclean’s
From the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
She is the author of more than thirty books, novels, short stories, poetry, literary criticism, social history, and books for children.
Atwood's work is acclaimed internationally and has been published around the world. Her novels include The Handmaid's Tale and Cat's Eye, both shortlisted for the Booker Prize; The Robber Bride; Alias Grace, winner of the prestigious Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy, and a finalist for the Booker Prize, the Orange Prize, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; and The Blind Assassin, winner of the Booker Prize and a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her new novel is Oryx and Crake. She is the recipient of numerous honours, such as The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence in the U.K., the National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature in the U.S., Le Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France, and she was the first winner of the London Literary Prize. She has received honorary degrees from universities across Canada, and one from Oxford University in England.
Margaret Atwood lives in Toronto with novelist Graeme Gibson.
From the Paperback edition.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Mango
Snowman wakes before dawn. He lies unmoving, listening to the tide coming in, wave after wave sloshing over the various barricades, wish-wash, wish-wash, the rhythm of heartbeat. He would so like to believe he is still asleep.
On the eastern horizon there's a greyish haze, lit now with a rosy, deadly glow. Strange how that colour still seems tender. The offshore towers stand out in dark silhouette against it, rising improbably out of the pink and pale blue of the lagoon. The shrieks of the birds that nest out there and the distant ocean grinding against the ersatz reefs of rusted car parts and jumbled bricks and assorted rubble sound almost like holiday traffic.
Out of habit he looks at his watch - stainless-steel case, burnished aluminum band, still shiny although it no longer works. He wears it now as his only talisman. A blank face is what it shows him: zero hour. It causes a jolt of terror to run through him, this absence of official time. Nobody nowhere knows what time it is.
"Calm down," he tells himself. He takes a few deep breaths, then scratches his bug bites, around but not on the itchiest places, taking care not to knock off any scabs: blood poisoning is the last thing he needs. Then he scans the ground below for wildlife: all quiet, no scales and tails. Left hand, right foot, right hand, left foot, he makes his way down from the tree. After brushing off the twigs and bark, he winds his dirty bedsheet around himself like a toga. He's hung his authentic-replica Red Sox baseball cap on a branch overnight for safekeeping; he checks inside it, flicks out a spider, puts it on.
He walks a couple of yards to the left, pisses into the bushes. "Heads up," he says to the grasshoppers that whir away at the impact. Then he goes to the other side of the tree, well away from his customary urinal, and rummages around in the cache he's improvised from a few slabs of concrete, lining it with wire mesh to keep out the rats and mice. He's stashed some mangoes there, knotted in a plastic bag, and a can of Sveltana No-Meat Cocktail Sausages, and a precious half-bottle of Scotch - no, more like a third - and a chocolate-flavoured energy bar scrounged from a trailer park, limp and sticky inside its foil. He can't bring himself to eat it yet: it might be the last one he'll ever find. He keeps a can opener there too, and for no particular reason an ice pick; and six empty beer bottles, for sentimental reasons and for storing fresh water. Also his sunglasses; he puts them on. One lens is missing but they're better than nothing.
He undoes the plastic bag: there's only a single mango left. Funny, he remembered more. The ants have got in, even though he tied the bag as tightly as he could. Already they're running up his arms, the black kind and the vicious little yellow kind. Surprising what a sharp sting they can give, especially the yellow ones. He rubs them away.
"It is the strict adherence to daily routine that tends towards the maintenance of good morale and the preservation of sanity," he says out loud. He has the feeling he's quoting from a book, some obsolete, ponderous directive written in aid of European colonials running plantations of one kind or another. He can't recall ever having read such a thing, but that means nothing. There are a lot of blank spaces in his stub of a brain, where memory used to be. Rubber plantations, coffee plantations, jute plantations. (What was jute?) They would have been told to wear solar topis, dress for dinner, refrain from raping the natives. It wouldn't have said raping. Refrain from fraternizing with the female inhabitants. Or, put some other way . . .
He bets they didn't refrain, though. Nine times out of ten.
"In view of the mitigating," he says. He finds himself standing with his mouth open, trying to remember the rest of the sentence. He sits down on the ground and begins to eat the mango.
Flotsam
On the white beach, ground-up coral and broken bones, a group of the children are walking. They must have been swimming, they're still wet and glistening. They should be more careful: who knows what may infest the lagoon? But they're unwary; unlike Snowman, who won't dip a toe in there even at night, when the sun can't get at him. Revision: especially at night.
He watches them with envy, or is it nostalgia? It can't be that: he never swam in the sea as a child, never ran around on a beach without any clothes on. The children scan the terrain, stoop, pick up flotsam; then they deliberate among themselves, keeping some items, discarding others; their treasures go into a torn sack. Sooner or later - he can count on it - they'll seek him out where he sits wrapped in his decaying sheet, hugging his shins and sucking on his mango, in under the shade of the trees because of the punishing sun. For the children - thick-skinned, resistant to ultraviolet - he's a creature of dimness, of the dusk.
Here they come now. "Snowman, oh Snowman," they chant in their singsong way. They never stand too close to him. Is that from respect, as he'd like to think, or because he stinks?
(He does stink, he knows that well enough. He's rank, he's gamy, he reeks like a walrus - oily, salty, fishy - not that he's ever smelled such a beast. But he's seen pictures.)
Opening up their sack, the children chorus, "Oh Snowman, what have we found?" They lift out the objects, hold them up as if offering them for sale: a hubcap, a piano key, a chunk of pale-green pop bottle smoothed by the ocean. A plastic BlyssPluss container, empty; a ChickieNobs Bucket O'Nubbins, ditto. A computer mouse, or the busted remains of one, with a long wiry tail.
Snowman feels like weeping. What can he tell them? There's no way of explaining to them what these curious items are, or were. But surely they've guessed what he'll say, because it's always the same.
"These are things from before." He keeps his voice kindly but remote. A cross between pedagogue, soothsayer, and benevolent uncle - that should be his tone.
"Will they hurt us?" Sometimes they find tins of motor oil, caustic solvents, plastic bottles of bleach. Booby traps from the past. He's considered to be an expert on potential accidents: scalding liquids, sickening fumes, poison dust. Pain of odd kinds.
"These, no," he says. "These are safe." At this they lose interest, let the sack dangle. But they don't go away: they stand, they stare. Their beachcombing is an excuse. Mostly they want to look at him, because he's so unlike them. Every so often they ask him to take off his sunglasses and put them on again: they want to see whether he has two eyes really, or three.
"Snowman, oh Snowman," they're singing, less to him than to one another. To them his name is just two syllables. They don't know what a snowman is, they've never seen snow.
It was one of Crake's rules that no name could be chosen for which a physical equivalent - even stuffed, even skeletal - could not be demonstrated. No unicorns, no griffins, no manticores or basilisks. But those rules no longer apply, and it's given Snowman a bitter pleasure to adopt this dubious label. The Abominable Snowman - existing and not existing, flickering at the edges of blizzards, apelike man or manlike ape, stealthy, elusive, known only through rumours and through its backward-pointing footprints. Mountain tribes were said to have chased it down and killed it when they had the chance. They were said to have boiled it, roasted it, held special feasts; all the more exciting, he supposes, for bordering on cannibalism.
For present purposes he's shortened the name. He's only Snowman. He's kept the abominable to himself, his own secret hair shirt.
After a few moments of hesitation the children squat down in a half-circle, boys and girls together. A couple of the younger ones are still munching on their breakfasts, the green juice running down their chins. It's discouraging how grubby everyone gets without mirrors. Still, they're amazingly attractive, these children - each one naked, each one perfect, each one a different skin colour - chocolate, rose, tea, butter, cream, honey - but each with green eyes. Crake's aesthetic.
They're gazing at Snowman expectantly. They must be hoping he'll talk to them, but he isn't in the mood for it today. At the very most he might let them see his sunglasses, up close, or his shiny, dysfunctional watch, or his baseball cap. They like the cap, but don't understand his need for such a thing - removable hair that isn't hair - and he hasn't yet invented a fiction for it.
They're quiet for a bit, staring, ruminating, but then the oldest one starts up. "Oh Snowman, please tell us - what is that moss growing out of your face?" The others chime in. "Please tell us, please tell us!" No nudging, no giggling: the question is serious.
"Feathers," he says.
They ask this question at least once a week. He gives the same answer. Even over such a short time - two months, three? He's lost count - they've accumulated a stock of lore, of conjecture about him: Snowman was once a bird but he's forgotten how to fly and the rest of his feathers fell out, and so he is cold and he needs a second skin, and he has to wrap himself up. No: he's cold because he eats fish, and fish are cold. No: he wraps himself up because he's missing his man thing, and he doesn't want us to see. That's why he won't go swimming. Snowman has wrinkles because he once lived underwater and it wrinkled up his skin. Snowman is sad because the others like him flew away over the sea, and now he is all alone.
"I want feathers too," says the youngest. A vain hope: no beards on the men, among the Children of Crake. Crake himself had found beards irrational; also he'd been irritated by the task of shaving, so he'd abolished the need for it. Though not of course for Snowman: t...
From AudioFile
Product details
- ASIN : B000FC1BNI
- Publisher : Anchor; Reprint edition (March 30, 2004)
- Publication date : March 30, 2004
- Language : English
- File size : 3295 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 400 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : 0349004064
- Best Sellers Rank: #31,004 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her novels include Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin and the MaddAddam trilogy. Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid's Tale, went back into the bestseller charts with the election of Donald Trump, when the Handmaids became a symbol of resistance against the disempowerment of women, and with the 2017 release of the award-winning Channel 4 TV series. ‘Her sequel, The Testaments, was published in 2019. It was an instant international bestseller and won the Booker Prize.’
Atwood has won numerous awards including the Booker Prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade and the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. She has also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright and puppeteer. She lives in Toronto, Canada.
Photo credit: Liam Sharp
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Customers find the book has an interesting concept and writing style. They appreciate the author's creativity and vivid descriptions of the world. However, some find the story boring and difficult to follow at times. There are mixed opinions on the pacing - some find it well-developed and coherent, while others feel it's too slow.
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Customers find the book thought-provoking. They describe it as a visionary dystopian trilogy with interesting concepts and worldbuilding that dovetails nicely with Marxist theories. The novel is described as action-packed, entertaining, and humane, with moments of joy and horror. Readers appreciate the author's ability to address issues in fiction that are present in real life.
"...horror of the situation is clearly exposed, there is a sense of inevitability to events, a clear line to its envisioned world from the headlines of..." Read more
"...The worldbuilding was fascinating as it dovetails so nicely with Marxist theories of late-stage capitalism and imperialism but I never developed an..." Read more
"...to students and adherents of alternative thinking and the philosophy of counterfactuals. And of course to any dystopian lit enthusiast!" Read more
"...This book is a literary novel, not a formulaic genre work, so it's useless to berate the author for not adhering to a science-fiction formula...." Read more
Customers find the book's writing style engaging and well-crafted. They praise the author's storytelling ability and appreciate her wide vocabulary. The narrative flows smoothly and is easy to read, with strong plot development and humor mixed in. Readers mention that the book is printed well and bound properly.
"...There are several layers of meaning and symbol buried within its fairly conventional story, layers that built an emotionally powerful edifice in my..." Read more
"...He's not a good man, but he's an exceedingly human one. *Or, more accurately, we see very little of how the poor live in Oryx and Crake...." Read more
"...It's well written, I find the characters interesting, and the book doesn't intellectualize to the points that you become disinterested...." Read more
"...then there is indeed much to look forward to. The author is a great story-teller, and this book (and others of hers) is ample proof of this,..." Read more
Customers enjoy the book's creativity. They find the style magnificent and vividly describe the world the author has created. The book is described as stunning, unique, and art of the highest order. It has an excellent theme and thought-provoking plot. The language and cinematic imagery enhance the story, making it fun and creative.
"...Sad and depressing, with little room for hope, a well depicted portrait of man as he is, unvarnished. ---..." Read more
"...Her style is magnificent. She weaves a beautiful word picture but never in a way that's obtrusive...." Read more
"...The little details are so vivid. I felt as though I understood who Jimmy was and what made him tick...." Read more
"...I liked it especially since I could vividly picture the world she created, which is something I haven't been able to do very well with other novels...." Read more
Customers have different views on the pacing. Some find the society believable and well-developed, while others feel the story lacks interest and character development. The plot is described as linear and unplausible, with an unmotivated last act.
"...The future holds much promise, and will be unlike anything the author envisages: yes, a world populated by thousands of new species of plants and..." Read more
"...Sad and depressing, with little room for hope, a well depicted portrait of man as he is, unvarnished. ---..." Read more
"...All of the topics are very interesting and well-thought out. The reason I'm giving it 4 stars is because it feels like it drags on...." Read more
"...The difficulty with 'Oryx and Crake' characters is their total lack of believability...." Read more
Customers have different views on the character development. Some find the characters compelling and well-developed, while others think they remain implausible or a parody of submissive Asian women. The book has some deep themes about controlling one's life.
"...Crake is a very interesting character, a super-genius who keeps his own emotions hidden, sometimes even from himself, as he first conceives of and..." Read more
"...It's well written, I find the characters interesting, and the book doesn't intellectualize to the points that you become disinterested...." Read more
"...I think he's kind of a bad guy in the story, because he is the whole reason for the destruction of the human race!..." Read more
"...It's a character study as much as a work of speculative fiction, and that's really Atwood's strength anyways...." Read more
Customers have different views on the humor in the book. Some find it humorous and melancholy at the same time, with good use of similes and metaphors. Others describe it as depressing, cynical, and hard to feel compassion for the characters.
"...I didn't find any glaring errors, and I got a lot of laughs out of the satire, the playing with words that the author obviously enjoyed and is..." Read more
"This is a Margaret Atwood book which means poetic prose, speculative fiction that's fear-based over science-based, and characters that are flawed-..." Read more
"...Sad and depressing, with little room for hope, a well depicted portrait of man as he is, unvarnished. ---..." Read more
"...Ms. Atwood, a witty graceful writer, has always treated the genre with respect ("The Handmaid's Tale" was her "exile in Orwellville")...." Read more
Customers find the book boring and unlikable. They say it's not their favorite Atwood book, but interesting. The main characters are described as flat and vaguely drawn. The prose fails to hold their attention, and the book is a disappointing waste of time.
"...Some parts of this book were boring, but if you are a math and science nerd like me, you will like this book...." Read more
"...but yet it never was. I really hated reading this book. It was a slog. Another book with an interesting concept but it just didn't catch me...." Read more
"...The three main characters in this book aren't particularly likable. Nor are the handful of secondary characters...." Read more
"...Towards the end of the book there are many pages that cannot be read. I am assuming the printer ran out of ink." Read more
Customers find the story difficult to follow and confusing for the first half of the book. They have a hard time getting into the story, finding the protagonist unlikable and difficult to relate to. The book takes too long to reveal the full picture, making it difficult to get invested in the story.
"...The heir apparents to humanity are a little too odd. It's difficult to decipher whether the animal habits and characterists genetically engineered..." Read more
"...The way the story is told, it's a little confusing to understand for younger people...." Read more
"...characters are well-developed and fascinating though almost uniformly difficult to like...." Read more
"...Surprisingly her prose is lackluster and for the first half of the book tedious...." Read more
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- Reviewed in the United States on November 19, 2003Certain scenarios have become standard fare, almost cliches, within the science fiction world. The end of civilization, indeed the death of man himself, due to his constant meddling with the environment, other life forms, and his own germ plasm have been envisaged many times before. This book remains a cut above most earlier attempts, as it adds a very believable human face to the disaster, ties it to both man's dreams and his nightmares, and wraps it inside a potent love triangle.
From the beginning of this book, where we meet Snowman, possibly the last true human, living in a tree and dependent on the half-human Children of Crake, till the very end of this book, where the full horror of the situation is clearly exposed, there is a sense of inevitability to events, a clear line to its envisioned world from the headlines of today. As Snowman tells his tale via flashbacks to his own past, a picture is developed of technology both fighting and aiding the deleterious effects of prior technologies. From the global warming induced drowning of the coasts and the collapse of world's resources abilities to feed an ever-growing population, to terrorist and greedy corporations designs of new diseases and environmentally harmful crosses of various animal species, each element piles on to background structure. In the foreground we follow Jimmy (Snowman's original name) and his childhood friend Glenn (Crake) as they go through school and find jobs as part of the elite, those whose mental abilities make them employable by the movers and shakers of the world, the genetic research laboratories. During their joint exploration of the internet, they run into Oryx, a child prostitute, who will eventually figure prominently in their lives.
Crake is a very interesting character, a super-genius who keeps his own emotions hidden, sometimes even from himself, as he first conceives of and then implements the idea of designing a better human. A human who is not subject to wild emotional swings of love, who will not have the need to defend property as he will live on grass and sunshine, who will be carefully isolated from any contact with violence-causing ideas such as 'God' and 'mine'. But Crake is not immune to being human himself, and is in fact dependent on others, primarily Oryx and Jimmy, which is really his flaw. Jimmy is the perennial follower, but when forced to take charge, his actions become the final lynch-pin in the ultimate disaster and his tales the beginning of a new mythology. Oryx is the ultimate woman, fully caring and giving, perhaps too much so, without the ability to turn others to a line of action of her choosing - but perhaps she never wished to. These characters grew on me as I learned more about them, as each had characteristics I could see in myself, different parts of a mirror.
The power of this book lies in the dynamic between the dream and the practical, between the intent and the result, between the giving and receiving of love. There are several layers of meaning and symbol buried within its fairly conventional story, layers that built an emotionally powerful edifice in my mind, an edifice completed with the last scene of this book. Sad and depressing, with little room for hope, a well depicted portrait of man as he is, unvarnished.
--- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)
- Reviewed in the United States on September 19, 2013Since MaddAddam, the concluding book in the trilogy which begins with Oryx and Crake, just came out it seemed like an ideal time to reread the other two books in the trilogy. I am really excited to see what Margaret Atwood does with MaddAddam given that Oryx and Crake and its follow-up, The Year of the Flood are so different in focus. Or, that's how I remember them; I'm just about to crack The Year of the Flood back open, so we'll see if that opinion still stands when I've finished it.
Back to Oryx and Crake. The plot is relatively straightforward: we follow a man named Jimmy from childhood to adulthood whose childhood friend and later employer, Crake, is a mad scientist. And we follow Jimmy as he tries to navigate a post-apocalyptic world caused by Crake. The book opens some years after this mad scientist has done his thing. Jimmy is both alone and not alone--Crake created an enhanced group of human beings, genetically lab-grown to perfectly fit their surroundings where Crake did his best to splice out `undesirable' elements of the human fabric. Jimmy tends to these people, whom he calls the Crakers, who are human but such a different kind of human that he is still utterly alone.
The narrative structure is split between chapters set in Jimmy's present, where he tends to the Crakers, and his past, which explores the world which led up to the birth of the Crakers and the destruction of everyone else. But the story is very clearly rooted in Jimmy's present; the chapters set in the past have a deliberate haziness to them, and Jimmy interjects commentary on his memories. Atwood makes it clear that rather than an objective narrative jump to the past what we are reading is present-day Jimmy remembering his own past. Like Winterson's Weight, this book explores the nature of narrative and how we use interpretations of our past to construct our own futures.
The idea of art and narrative as hard-wired into human beings, as one of the intangible things that makes us human, is a theme in the book. Jimmy is a self-described `word person' in a world where words no longer get you very far. Atwood's future is a destroyed and severely overpopulated Earth where capitalism has run amok. Global warming has ruined the climate, leading to the destruction of many major cities. Class is clearly defined by occupation--the upper classes, uniformly technical and biological geniuses working in elite labs at elite corporations, live in sealed-off and secure corporate communities. There, these scientists are protected from the biological warfare and espionage from competing companies. The middle class live in Modules, and everyone else lives in the pleeblands. Jimmy, the product of two elite scientists, grows up in corporate compounds. The pleeblands are places of myth, of seductive legend, to him and as a reader we see very little of how the poor in Atwood's world live*. So, there's Jimmy, who lacks his parents' capacity for numbers and science stuck in places that do not value his gift for empathy and wordplay. Coupled with his best friend Glenn (who becomes Crake), who is an obvious wunderkind, and Jimmy is left with an inferiority complex the size of Texas.
I read this book the year it came out, in 2003. I remember being somewhat fascinated by it but not liking it much, which was disappointing as I was and still am a major Atwood fan. I was in Boston, living on the couch of a friend and elbows-deep in a summer of socialist organizing. I'd scored a s***ty summer job on campus which I abandoned on the spur of the moment to couch-surf and read a lot of Trotsky and argue with people about whether we, as socialists, should support and campaign for Ralph Nader. I was driving a lot of conversations about masculinity in activist spaces and how it was alienating female members of our organization. This was the summer I began to embrace my proletariat roots instead of trying to shed them; a moment, if you'll indulge me, of internal class crisis. I picked up Oryx and Crake for some light reading, and frankly I picked it up at the wrong moment in my life. Jimmy, as a narrator, was not someone I could connect to at that moment in my life--his male, upper-class privileged voice and viewpoint was simply a bridge too far. The worldbuilding was fascinating as it dovetails so nicely with Marxist theories of late-stage capitalism and imperialism but I never developed an emotional connection with the book.
I read it now as someone ten years older. As someone who has, in some very real sense, sold out. I'm middle class now, a thing which I struggle with but is very obviously true. I'm reading it again after doing some heavy-duty renovation on my own psychological landscape which has left me a much more compassionate and less judgmental person. This time around, I connected much more with Jimmy, especially his imposter syndrome. My initial reading of the book as a self-righteous 19 year old was that it lacked depth, that is was a bit obvious. But I'm not sure that's true. It's certainly the case that Atwood as a writer creates stark worlds where Things Have Gone So Very Wrong, but it's also true that within those worlds she's a writer of immense subtlety. I mean to say that the worlds she creates are not subtle, but that the people within them still are. This book, I think, is less a warning about capitalism run rampant or the dangers of playing god with science. I think it's more about the things that Crake tried and failed to breed out of his batch of `perfected' humans: our capacity and need for story, for meaning. I think this is a book about what happens to a culture where we abandon art, where our creative meaning-making of the world around us is seen as less-than and unnecessary. When we do that, Atwood seems to say, we lose our souls. In a sense, then, our compulsion to create and to describe and to enrich is intimately tied with our embedded altruism. All of which is to say that I understand better now why Atwood chose hapless Jimmy, word-oriented and patient Jimmy as her narrator. He's not a good man, but he's an exceedingly human one.
*Or, more accurately, we see very little of how the poor live in Oryx and Crake. We see a whole lot more of life in the pleeblands in The Year of the Flood.
Top reviews from other countries
- FitzsimonsReviewed in Canada on November 7, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Atwood's Best Book. Get the audiobook too
This is an amazing book. It's not just for my bookshelf, i've read some of it, but where i've "read" all of it is by audiobook. This is Margaret Atwood's best book.
- VickyReviewed in India on August 9, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Arrive in perfect condition
The book arrived in perfect condition. No damages.
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NURIAReviewed in Spain on October 23, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars Magnífico, como toda la obra de Atwood
Aparte de que es una escritora genial, es una visionaria. Hay que leerla
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Laura BuffaReviewed in Italy on June 9, 2021
5.0 out of 5 stars Finalmente una storia di Fanta scienza apocalittica ( ma davvero fantascienza? O molto possibile futuro?) ben scritta e coinvolgente
Finalmente una storia di Fanta scienza apocalittica ( ma davvero fantascienza? O molto possibile futuro?) ben scritta e coinvolgente. Leggerò anche il seguito
- DolmupReviewed in France on February 9, 2019
5.0 out of 5 stars Oh Margaret !
Discovered with the Handmaid ’s Tale , Margaret Atwood fascinates me by her writing and her creativity. What a story. The reader discovers progressively who is who in this apocalyptic world. A world not that different from our close future ?