Review: Oryx and Crake

Title: Oryx and Crake
Author: Margaret Atwood
Year of Publication: 2003
Genre: Science Fiction/Fiction
Length: The paperback version has 443 pages.
Rating: 4/5 – Worth paying full price.

Review:

Oryx and Crake is one of two novels that I have read by Margaret Atwood that are about a utopian future turned to dystopia, the other being The Handmaid’s Tale (1998). The story takes place in the future, and switches between two points in time; one that takes place during the younger years of the main character, who calls himself Snowman, and one that takes place when he is older, after the catastrophe. Atwood opens the story in the second future as Snowman is waking up in a tree, wishing that he was still asleep.

The first future is mostly dim, sometimes bright. The world is not much changed, and seems to be a possible next step from where we are now. There are gated communities for the rich and the smart, where Snowman (then called Jimmy) and Crake grew up. The less-fortunate live in the pleeblands, a somewhat more chaotic place.

Snowman is an everyman, as there isn’t anything particularly special about him. He’s reasonably attractive, smart enough to go to a college after high school, and sociable enough to make friends and have relationships. Crake, his best friend and a genius, treats Snowman more like a pet that he likes to have around than a friend, and brings him into a world that is way over his head by giving him a job in advertising for a miracle sex drug, called BlyssPluss.

In the post-catastrophe world, Snowman appears to be the only true human left, and lives near a group of beings called the Children of Crake, who are customized humans. These people are physically perfect and beautiful, and eat only vegetation. They were created by humans, and are now taking their places. They see Snowman as a sort of lesser God, and Oryx, who was a friend to both Jimmy and Crake, as their Goddess. The novel builds her up as a mysterious Goddess before we get to meet the real, human Oryx.

Throughout the novel, there are themes of love, sexuality, ethics, and the subjectiveness of beauty. There are companies that raise “animals” that are little more than living hunks of meat – is it okay to kill them if they don’t have a nervous system and don’t feel pain? – and there is a rise in the sex industries, especially in children. Power has gone into the hands of the geniuses with money, corporations have taken over, and everywhere there are distractions, distractions and more distractions from feeling real emotions.

Some criticize the novel as being just another cautionary tale, and it’s true that Atwood is going the usual path of a dark future where we’re somehow worse than we are now. Humans are on a path to self-destruction, it warns, and here’s what could happen. Despite that, the book is addictive and hard to put down; Atwood has a writing style that draws you in, makes you feel what the characters are feeling, and slowly builds and builds on the story and the world until you know it intimately. She presents human beings as being beautiful in their faults, and demonstrates through the new species of humanity that inherent beauty through birth, without faults, without hate, without inhibitions, is in itself not human.

Although Oryx and Crake is mysteriously categorized as fiction, probably because Atwood herself is mostly a fiction writer, this is definitely science fiction. If you like a gripping, depressing dystopia – and who doesn’t, from time to time – this is for you.