Oryx and Crake

This book sat around in my bookshelf for a couple of years before I finally read it. Wow! Margaret Atwood manages to pack so much into one book. She questions everything from defining human, the use of technology, money and morals, an end-of-the-world scenario and morality in general. And that’s just the start of it!

Atwood explores all of this through three characters. Jimmy/Snowman is your average slacker. He’s someone who could have done better with their life but somehow never quite got there. Then there’s his best friend and counterpart, the brilliant Crake. Crake is no doubt a genius but, is that an excuse for what seems to be a lack of morals? Finally, there’s Oryx; loved by both of them and quite possibly the only one with any knowledge about the true nature of love.

In non-linear fashion, we jump-cut our way through their personal histories to watch the tapestry of doom become increasingly sullied by humanity’s social, scientific and environmental atrocities until the fabric rips as a solution is found. One of this book’s strengths is the extrapolation of current human activity to partially form the plot, another is the level of research Atwood must have done in order make some of the ideas plausible and darkly humorous.

‘Oh Snowman, tell us a story’. Well, Margret Atwood did and I loved every bit of it.

This book kind of irks me. Having read it twice now - once for a course in university, and once because I wanted to see if I still disliked it - I can at least say that I don't think it's the book, it's me.

Oryx and Crake has five-star prose. The way Atwood writes is just fantastic, so even when I'm dealing with piles of other junk I can keep reading.

It has four-star worldbuilding. The dystopia presented is believable - probably moreso now than when the book was published - and the details all seem to slot into various thematic messages that peek out throughout the book. The development of the Crakers and how Snowman tries to teach them about the world is most of the reason I wanted to keep reading. A few details are a bit dated, but on the whole everything develops wonderfully.

Speaking of theme, I see the thematic development as about three stars. There's a lot of environmentalism, anti-geneticism, anti-consumerism, and probably a slew of other anti-things that I'm probably forgetting. These things are prevalent throughout the book, to the crazy density of the literary short stories that we were forced to read in high school, and that's great. But in the end, it feels like most of the themes are frayed threads that never quite terminate properly. The apocalyptic scenario is so blatantly wrong that it doesn't really give us any finality, it just causes some of them to fizzle. Sure, environmentalism is important and consumerism is ruining the planet and giving pigs human brains might be a bit extreme... but also starting from zero with a race of superhumans isn't exactly a reasonable way to deal with that. This is a book that discusses a lot of important issues really well, and then in the end says "and if we do nothing we'll probably kill ourselves." Which is a perfectly reasonable stance, it's just a bit of a sucker punch in novel form.

I don't really enjoy the way the plot is laid out, so I'd give that two stars. I don't think it's actually a problem with the book, I just don't enjoy the sort of non-linear flashbacks with fairly slow pacing. Honestly, I can't think of how I'd rather this was story told, I just didn't enjoy it. C'est la vie.

The crux of my dislike is really the characters. Solid one star. Jimmy is an awful protagonist. Snowman's basically fine, even if he's unreliable as all hell and technically the same person, but following Jimmy through life is just horrible. He barely seems to see other people as people, he barely does anything, he barely cares about anything. Anytime something vaguely interesting happens in his life it's because of Crake. He demonstrates basically no agency. We watch Jimmy get drunk and screw housewives while he works some marketing job that barely matters to him or us and generally whines about getting old. Quite honestly, Jimmy is a totally realistic person whose life story is just not interesting in the slightest outside of what Crake pushes him into.

Yet the worst part of having Jimmy as a protagonist isn't Jimmy, it's how he sees everyone else. In his eyes, no one else seems to be much of a person, more of a cardboard cutout who gets classified as lover, family, friend, or unimportant. From his middle-school flings to his relationship with Oryx, they all could practically be copy-pasted on top of each other in how he interacts with them and how they interact with him. Even Oryx, who he actually cares about, doesn't seem to be any different. He sees Crake as a friend, and for the entirety of their lives he pretty much treats Crake the same way even when he's clearly long since gone off the deep end. He both loves and doesn't care much for his mother, father, and eventually Ramona, with his mother getting a special spotlight mostly because she manages to develop into a nice little source of trauma for him.

Sometimes I would think that this would be much more interesting if it jumped between Snowman and Crake's POVs, but I'm pretty sure Crake sees people the same way, so probably no help there.

Unfortunately, this is all written with such clear care and attention that I can't even be upset about it. I didn't enjoy it much, but I have more respect for Atwood than ever before. If anything, I'm upset with myself for not liking this book.

So, lacking a great way to plot "I really disliked it but it was great" on a five-point scale I'm just gonna slap two stars on my review and call it good enough.

I really struggled through the first... three-quarters of this book? The ideas were interesting and I wanted to watch things happen in this world, but that wasn't how it went down. It does starts picking up around page 300 or so, though.

The book is nominally about Snowman, the survivor of an apocalyptic plague who's living in ruins trying to help care for a group of genetically engineered transhumans known as Crakers. I was interested in this story, and I wanted to know what will happen to the Crakers, but the book consists almost entirely to flashbacks into Snowman's past, when he was known as Jimmy.

Jimmy's life is chronicled from childhood up until the aftermath of the apocalypse, and his close friendship with a man known to him as Crake gives the reader insight into the ongoing collapse of the planet and of society, especially the wild excesses of biomedical and biotechnological megacorporations that eventually leads to the apocalypse. The ideas here are interesting, but throughout the flashback sections that actually make up the meat of the prose, I kept wishing we'd get back to Snowman's present and find out what happens after the apocalypse.

There's also something bizarre about the way Atwood presents Jimmy's internal thought process that doesn't click. She writes his narration in what seems to be an unbelievably self-aware way - not in the sense that he's being ironic about himself, but in the sense that the narration seems to be classifying and psychoanalyzing him at the same time as it tries to present his subjective self-perceived mental life. It's weird and muddled.

That said, I do want to know more about how the Crakers and the other survivors will make their way in the apocalypse, so I think I'll still go read The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam later to round out the trilogy. I just hope they don't tease a present storyline and bury it in flashbacks, and that the characterization is a bit more consistent.

This is a post-apocalyptic science fiction novel. You learn early on that the protagonist (pretty much the only-agonist) is the last person (or almost) left alive after a biological catastrophe.

I have seen writers take several approaches to outlining how the world ended. I have noticed two ares in which these approaches vary:

(a) how much information about the cause of the world's end is given in total (in [b:Oryx and Crake|15973770|Oryx and Crake|Jesse Russell|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1355145594s/15973770.jpg|21725418] you are told everything; in [b:The Road|6288|The Road|Cormac McCarthy|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1320606344s/6288.jpg|3355573] you are told almost nothing), and

(b) the time arrow (which can be crooked or straight, can be interspersed with the main narrative as flashbacks (as in [b:Oryx and Crake|15973770|Oryx and Crake|Jesse Russell|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1355145594s/15973770.jpg|21725418]) or can be simultaneous with the time of the narrative (as in [b:The Stand|149267|The Stand|Stephen King|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1213131305s/149267.jpg|1742269]), or there can be other approaches.

In this book you are eventually given full detail on how it happened, and this is engineered as a series of flashbacks (which make up a bit more than half the story) to the protagonist's youth and his friendship with a brilliant future scientist who will play a role in what's to come.

Atwood does a very good job in the narrative: the book is gripping and there is a nice balance of how far to develop a current thread before switching to another one, and how long to wait before returning to the previous thread.

The character development is OK but limited. The narrative devices used to describe people, such as conversation blocks, are good and effective, and I see the characters as truly different, so that is all good, but I do not see a depiction that introduces me to someone I don't know yet at all.

Jimmy was a member of a scientific elite, living in isolation, suffering through bitter loneliness. Then an unnamed apocalypse came along, now he is known as Snowman and he may be one of the few survivors. This post-apocalyptic hermit resides near; what he refers to as Crakers—strange human-like creatures. In flashbacks the story develops, the Crakers, Wolvogs, Pigoons and Rakunks are assorted life forms that are the products of genetic engineering.

Oryx and Crake are the symbols of a fractured society, which Jimmy was once a part of. This is where trying to explain this novel can get complex. There are two different worlds within this book the post-apocalyptic world but then there are the flashbacks. The dystopian world was far more interesting for me. Much like Super Sad True Love Story. this is a dystopian world that I can see coming, corporation’s rule the world and pornography has become mainstream. It is normal to watch live executions and surgeries, nudie news (apparently watching the news when they are fully clothed is just weird), even child pornography.

I love novels that deal with the dangers of corporations having too much power; Super Sad True Love Story is a prime example of it (I should re-read that novel) and Oryx and Crake is another example of this (need more examples). Science and marketing techniques leave the public as powerless consumers and there is nothing to stop the unprecedented corporate greed.

Genetic engineering is a slippery slope; I seem to find myself attracted to novels that deal with science going too far. Oryx and Crake is a great example of this; Crake is a scientist working in the biotech project that created the Crakers. Genetic engineering progress continued to advance and eventually lead to a complex and sinister project called Paradice, but when that collapsed it caused this global devastation.

Oryx was a girl Jimmy and Crake found on a child pornography site that eventually was hired by Crake as a prostitute and to teach the Crakers. Oryx obviously had a difficult past, and Oryx and Crake attempts to deal with this issue as well. This is not an easy issue to deal with, the majority of the world would say they are against child pornography and yet it continues to happen and we see no signs of it ever being truly dealt with. Margaret Atwood doesn’t have a problem with trying to deal with difficult issues and this novel has plenty to say.

Moving away from the dystopian world and into the post-apocalyptic one, we have a whole new set of themes and issues. While this is a direct result of the corporate destruction, now we have to deal with survival. The Crakers are like little helpless children that Snowman tries to help; so now we have parental responsibilities as a major theme as well as our social responsibilities. He also has to protect them from the Wolvogs, Pigoons, Rakunks and whatever might disrupt their civilisation.

This is the second Margaret Atwood novel I’ve read and I’m starting to see a familiar theme coming through in her novels. I believe she wants the reader to have a look at civilisation and what we are doing that is beneficial or harmful. I’m sure the rest of the Maddadam trilogy will deal with this; I’m not sure if all her books have a similar theme but I suspect they might.

I love a novel that tells a great story but is also loaded with different themes and symbolism. I feel so fulfilled reading a book like Oryx and Crake and spending time digesting the words and examining what Atwood wants to tell us. I was meaning to read this novel for so long and now I’m left with intense desire to read the next two in the series. Thanks you Bloomsbury Australia for pressuring me into reading this book, I have no regrets.

This review originally appeared on my blog; literary-exploration.com/2013/09/09/book-review-oryx-and-crake/

After an apocalyptic disaster, Snowman is the sole caretaker of a group of Crakers--a simple-minded, genetically-engineered people. But his past haunts him, and he relives the events leading up to the world-altering disaster.

It's hard for me to write anything about this novel without comparing it to Atwood's brilliant "Blind Assassin". The structure is very similar: an important event happened in the past, and the narrator slowly reveals the past while continuing on their life in their present. It's a tactic that worked well in "The Blind Assassin" because the narrator is a grandmother that I'm sure every reader could relate to. However, in "Oryx and Crake", the narrator is a crusty, disgruntled, semi-isolated man who is about as unappealing and uninteresting as a character can get. With "The Blind Assassin", the past event is a death, and we are intrigued right from the beginning because of the human connection, and we automatically want to know what happened and why. With "Oryx and Crake", the past event is an apocalypse, and somehow the what and why seem like trivialities. Really, it could have been any number of disasters and it wouldn't have made one bit of difference to the story. Pick your disaster. There's no intrigue despite all the background story Atwood conjures up because the characters are only moderately interesting.

One of the few redeeming things about the novel is the social structure that Atwood creates. It's an interesting society we become in her story. It's not too far off from our current model, and as such, offers a nice commentary on where we may be heading. In addition to this, it also offers a discussion about men playing God--in both senses of the concept. One, by creating and destroying the lives of others as if they are wise and all-knowing. Second, in the sense of creating mythology and doctrine for people to follow.

If you're a fan of the genre, then give it a try--just keep your expectations low. If you're a fan of good writing and characters, perhaps "The Blind Assassin" is the way to go as it seems to me with this novel Atwood was too caught up in her creation of the Crakers that she thought she was writing a story for them as well. I expected better.

Here's a spoiler and a major problem that wasn't addressed in the story: Why didn't Jimmy just duplicate the vaccine that Crake had been secretly giving him when he visited the Pleeblands? Surely the technology existed to do it quite easily.