Oryx and Crake
by Margaret Atwood
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Book Summary Information
Author: Margaret AtwoodEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-05
ISBN: 0385721676
Number of pages: 376
Publisher: Anchor
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780385721677
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Oryx and Crake
Book Review: Intelligent addition to dystopia
Summary: 5 Stars
Oryx and Crake opens to find "Snowman," alone and malnourished in a tree. Believing himself (and convincing us) he's the last remaining human on the planet, he watches over a curious group of multi-colored beings known to us only as the "Children of Crake" and the "Children of Oryx." Their odd behavior and impressionable nature has both entertained and exasperated Snowman up to this point. While he's relished the power he's had helping them navigate what remains of the world around them, he's also found the lack of normal conversation frustrating. In his lingering despair, he traces his steps in time as he narrates through memory the events leading up to the mysterious plague that's wiped out humanity. He walks through the broken city, avoiding wolvogs and pigoons--weird genetic amalgamations bred for specific traits and features--and finds in the wasteland the memories of a better time when the deserted streets he now walks flourished with people, activity, and promise.
One of the first things we learn is Snowman's name isn't really Snowman--it's Jimmy. Before he reduced himself to walking around on a beach wrapped in a bed sheet, he lived on a compound with his parents, two OrganInc Farms scientists churning out the latest ideas for growing human-tissue organs and implementing their strategy on things like pigoons--a pig genetically altered to grow several organs at once that would then be harvested for human use. The genius of the project isn't just the end product, it's the guilt-free sustainability of the pigs as continued organ hosts. Once a product is reaped for use, the pig isn't rendered useless--it continues to live and grow more organs like a tomato plant. The perpetua of the Pigoon project served to satiate concerns over waste and humane treatment. After all, who would want an organ harvested from an abused or poorly treated animal?
What drives Oryx and Crake forward is the desire to find out who Oryx and Crake are, what caused the plague that killed so many people, what Jimmy's past has to do with his present, who are the weird, child-like beings Snowman surrounds himself with and why. What begins as a tale backward in time to Jimmy's childhood unravels into a long demonstration of the tortuous back and forth game Snowman plays with himself: what if he had seen the clues earlier? What if he had said or done something? Could he have actually done anything? This recollection of events that turns into our narrative is a type of self-flagellation as Snowman tries once more to rid himself of the guilt of hindsight.
As his story unfolds, we learn Crake (originally Glenn--with two n's) and Jimmy met in middle school and developed an odd relationship that survived into adulthood. Crake was an intellectual genius and after the two separated, went to one of the best schools, one of the best companies, rose to an enviable position at the top of a secret project rumored to alter the way mortality is thought of. Oryx is the survivor of a third world sex trade, hired by Crake to work on his project. Jimmy gets caught in between the two--in love with Oryx, admiring of Crake who, by now, has not only become his best (if oddly detached, tunnel-visioned) friend, but his only friend. Crake also happens to love Oryx.
Don't let the romance run away with you. It's really not the center of the plot, but rather, only a part of the complicated fulcrum that churns events around Jimmy, catching him in a vortex of his own shortcomings. It's as much about the elusive figures of Oryx and Crake as it is about the legacy they've left behind and Snowman's struggle to make sense of them even after they're gone. He lives amidst the ghosts of Blood and Roses, of Extinctathon, of the "human experiment." To his credit, he calls himself Snowman after the "Abominable Snowman," the mythical creature and for the transient nature of humanity (apropos to the short life of a snowman), to celebrate the here and now and exist in the present; in short, to celebrate himself as human, a monkey brain, juxtaposed against the creatures created to be better than their models.
Margaret Atwood's imagined future is a marvelous and frightening extension of extant society and global concerns. Gene splicers have discovered ways to postpone the weather of age (through multiple and continued trial and error), create chickens that appear to be 95% edible meat, 5% niggling details, and process even more food for easier consumption. The product, company, and marketing names, if anything, make this book worth reading: ChickieNobs, Sveltana No-Meat Cocktail Sausages, HelthWyzer, NooSkins, BlyssPluss, RejoovenEsense, Paradice (this one might be my favorite, layered as it is).
Scientists have an elevated role in Oryx and Crake. They live in compounds separated from normal cities, or Pleeblands--an odd combination of "plebeian" and "bland," apt descriptions for society's opinion of these ordinary, unexceptional (non-genius) people. They work on everything from food, health, and beauty, to pets and disease control. It might be said that the biotechnology here is almost too present and unsurprising. The same could go for the wide variety of (and cavalier attitude toward) porn websites, crazy marketing campaigns, the extent of animal extinction, and the ever-present threat of global warming, but that's the point of a dystopian novel. What we read is supposed to be quite similar to what we're familiar with--so similar in fact, that it imagines a frightening reality, one which grows from the depths of the society of today and projects into the not-so-far-off future. We're supposed to see in Oryx and Crake the derivations of modern practices, foods, and morals to see how close Atwood's reality is to today's, to imagine one possible extension of rising sea levels, vaccinations, disease, cosmetic surgery, genetically enhanced foods. This is not to say Atwood can do no wrong, it's to say I had little to no problem believing her projections and on one level wondering, why are we not already there?
Oryx and Crake takes you on a frightening and mysterious journey to uncover the truth. It's masterfully written, intelligent, and at times, witty. Fans of Margaret Atwood who haven't read it, should. If you like dystopian novels, don't let this one pass under your radar! Add it to your library. I already want to read it again.
Summary of Oryx and Crake
Oryx and Crake is at once an unforgettable love story and a compelling vision of the future. 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.In Oryx and Crake, a science fiction novel that is more Swift than Heinlein, more cautionary tale than "fictional science" (no flying cars here), Margaret Atwood depicts a near-future world that turns from the merely horrible to the horrific, from a fool's paradise to a bio-wasteland. Snowman (a man once known as Jimmy) sleeps in a tree and just might be the only human left on our devastated planet. He is not entirely alone, however, as he considers himself the shepherd of a group of experimental, human-like creatures called the Children of Crake. As he scavenges and tends to his insect bites, Snowman recalls in flashbacks how the world fell apart.
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
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