Oryx and Crake
Margaret Atwood
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 376 pages
Order this book Oryx and Crake
opens on a mystery: a lone man called Snowman, slowly starving to death in
a world apparently empty of human beings like himself. Some great catastrophe
has clearly taken place; there are references to rubble, buildings drowned
by the sea, relics of civilization washed up by the waves. Strangely-named
creatures--pigoons, wolvogs--stalk the land (Snowman sleeps in a tree for
fear of them). There are also the Children of Crake--eerily perfect beings
whose exquisite human forms can’t disguise the fact that they’re not quite
human, for whom Snowman appears to feel both distaste and some sort of responsibility.
Who is Snowman? How did he survive? What happened to bring things to such
a state?
The novel unfolds the answers to these questions in two parallel narratives--of
Snowman and his cathartic journey back to the derelict laboratory complex
once run by his boyhood friend Crake, who appears in some way to be responsible
for the change that has overtaken the world; and of Jimmy, the man Snowman
used to be, in the time before everything collapsed. Jimmy is born into a
world some distance further along the downward spiral of climate change,
genetic manipulation, viral mutation, and social stratification than our
own, but still basically functional. In high school, Jimmy encounters Crake
(not his real name, but the alias he uses for an “interactive biofreak masterlore”
game called Extinctathon), an enigmatic genius with a deep contempt for the
human animal, with its inefficient biology and dependence on the primitive
primate brain. Later, Jimmy goes to work for Crake at Paradice, Crake’s fabulous
cutting-edge laboratory, and falls in love with the equally enigmatic Oryx,
whose image he encountered years before on a kiddie porn site and has been
obsessed with ever since. Oryx is also loved by Crake, for whom she seems
to serve as a sort of muse. But this isn’t a conventional love triangle.
While the tensions it creates do have consequences, they play out as part
of a final scenario carefully devised by Crake--who, destroyer and creator
both, is determined to make the world anew in his own image.
Mainstream critics especially have been moved to compare this book to Atwood’s other work of “speculative” fiction, The Handmaid’s Tale.
But though all speculative fiction may look alike to those who aren’t used
to it, and any speculative fiction may seem best compared to itself by those
don’t know what else to compare it to (and to be fair, many of the reviews
from within the SF community have been equally obtuse), Oryx and Crake
resembles that serious, ideology-driven parable of gender relations about
as much as it resembles Atwood's previous non-speculative novel, The Blind Assassin,
which also features a protagonist stranded in a (figurative) wasteland, and
proceeds by means of a double narrative toward revelation of a shattering
secret. Oryx and Crake is concerned not with social inequity but with
the disastrous consequences of human hubris--specifically, the temptation
to play God that is presented by our unfolding knowledge of the human genome; it’s
also a blistering satire, ruthlessly skewering the follies and obsessions
and atrocities of the present day (amazingly, this aspect of the novel appears
to have been missed by many reviewers, who seem to assume that Atwood’s approach
is entirely serious, and thus fault her for, in the words of one writer,
“a morbid silliness”). As such, it stands more with Swift and Mary Shelley
than with Atwood’s earlier speculative work--and also, which Atwood may not
have intended, with such writers of cautionary science fiction as John Brunner,
whose Stand on Zanzibar, published decades earlier, touches
on a number of the themes and issues Atwood examines in this book.
The satire is the most accessible level of the novel (or at least I thought
so, until I began to research the reviews). The cyberpunkishly hegemonic
corporations that dominate the world have deliberately cartoonish names--HelthWyzer,
RejoovenEsense, AnooYoo--as do the consumer products they produce: Happicuppa
coffee (whose genetically-engineered ripen-all-at-once coffee bushes trigger
worldwide riots), SoYummie ice cream, a high-tech version of snake oil called
BlyssPluss. There are the bizarre products of gene-splicing--Rockulators,
which absorb moisture in humid weather and then release it back (the Moses
Model--slogan, “Just Hit It With A Rod”); ChickieNobs, nightmarish headless
chickens designed to extrude chicken parts for fast-food franchises. There
are the websites: Hott Totts for kiddie porn, brainfrizz.com for live executions,
alibooboo.com for realtime coverage of hand-loppings and adulteror-stonings
in fundamentalist Middle Eastern countries. There are the new creatures spliced
together for fun by bored genetic scientists--bobkittens, snats, rakunks--and
more purposeful creations, such as the pigoons, pigs engineered to grow organs
for human transplantation (whoops: those already exist). There the games
Crake and Jimmy play as adolescents: Kwiktime Osama, Three Dimensional Waco,
and the strange Extinctathon, which later proves significant to the plot.
The book is stuffed with such cleverly lampoonish yet eerily plausible details;
one imagines Atwood had a lot of fun thinking them up.
This gene-splicing, instant-gratification, cheap-thrills culture, satirically
extrapolated from of some of the ugliest popular trends of the present day,
exists in a not-so-satirical dystopian setting that’s also extrapolated from
scary present problems. Climate change and uncontrolled disease mutation
have devastated the world. Society has become rigidly stratified: the privileged
live in sealed Compounds run by the corporations for which they work, while
the rest must brave the chaos of the pleeblands, as the cities have come
to be called, where dirt, crime, and exotic plagues abound. (Oryx, a product
of the pleebland world, provides a sharp counterpoint to anomic, dissatisfied,
Compound-born Jimmy, not only in the horrible nature of her experiences but
in her refusal to regard herself as a victim of them). Science is king; art
and artistic pursuits have been superseded by advancing technology and a
general lack of interest. While Crake goes off after high school to the prestigious
Watson-Crick Academy, a glitteringly luxurious mecca of learning whose students
study disciplines like Décor Botanicals and NeoAgriculturals, Jimmy’s
talent for words and ideas relegates him to a shabby arts-and-humanities
college, where he wallows in the detritus of the previous century’s preoccupations,
haunting the library with its moldering stacks of paper books and compiling
lists of obscure words like a magpie hoarding treasure--a foretaste of his
Snowman future, where there literally will be no one but himself to remember
them. (This segment allows Atwood, an equal-opportunity satirist, to make
ruthless fun of artistic pretension.)
Brilliant, emotionally stunted, unencumbered by either compassion or any
conventional system of ethics, Crake is an inevitable product of this world--the
ultimate expression of its most destructive trends, the scourge that it has
birthed and brought upon itself. The secret project on which he embarks after
he leaves Watson-Crick enables him quite literally to play God; lest the
point be missed, Atwood furnishes this portion of the book with a series
of Biblical references. The lab Crake builds to house his life’s work is
called Paradice (also invoking Einstein’s dictum. God may not play dice,
but humankind certainly does). The scientists Crake hires to work for him
are part of a group called MaddAddam, originators of the Extinctathon game
to which Crake was so addicted in his youth (Extinctathon’s slogan: “Adam
named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones”). The Children of
Crake, humanity re-engineered to Crake’s design (and partly in his image:
they have his strange green eyes), are as innocent as Adam and Eve. In time
they are cast out of Paradice, not through their own choice but as part of
Crake’s plan to improve on creation/evolution.
Ultimately, though, human
nature has the last laugh. Did God mean for humankind to invent religion
after the Fall? Crake certainly doesn’t want his new humans to have faith,
which he considers a pointless and destructive distraction: along with other
changes and improvements, he has engineered out the religious impulse. Or
so he thinks. Driven by the same need that has terrified and uplifted humankind
throughout the ages--to know the reason for its existence--his Children transform
him posthumously into a deity. Perhaps every god’s creation gets away from
him in the end.
Brilliant as lampoon and as allegory, as a work of fiction Oryx and Crake
isn’t so satisfactory. Jimmy/Snowman, venal and self-deceiving yet ultimately
sympathetic, is a character of admirable complexity; both the quiet desperation
of his pre-disaster life and the ferocious loneliness of his post-disaster
existence are powerfully conveyed. But Crake lacks definition, perhaps because
he must carry so much thematic baggage; he’s more a symbolic force than a
human being, and his motivations, which Atwood doesn’t really attempt to
delve into, seem to spring less from character than from the demands of the
novel’s premise. Oryx has more dimension, but her story of abuse and exploitation
seems to stand oddly outside the concerns of this book, as if she’s a visitor
from some other novel; and her brief appearance in the real-time narrative
(in contrast to the large role she plays in Jimmy/Snowman’s memory) isn’t
enough to explain why Crake is so fixated on her, or why he acts as he does
at the end. Finally, the conclusion, which abandons Jimmy/Snowman at a lady-and-the-tiger-like
moment of decision, is too arbitrary to be satisfying. The chapter is called
“Footprint”, but even the reference to Robinson Crusoe--with Jimmy/Snowman
playing a role that seems closer to Man Friday’s than to Crusoe’s--isn’t
enough to give definition to this abrupt finish.
But such novelistic shortcomings are often a feature of utopian and dystopian
fiction, where intellectual exploration is paramount and plot and character
take second place. As an intellectual exploration--as satire, and as warning--Oryx and Crake
succeeds fully. Gripping, scary, hilarious, and moving, its nightmare
vision of where we might end up holds a mirror to where we are right now,
and urges us to ask not just the obvious question--can we stop?--but a more
frightening one: are we already too far down the road?
Copyright © 2003 Victoria Strauss
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