Oryx & Crake

Review of Margaret Atwood’s “Oryx & Crake”

“What if we continue down the road we’re already on? How slippery is the slope? What are our saving graces? Who’s got the will to stop us?” – Margaret Atwood on writing “Oryx and Crake”

Margaret Atwood’s latest novel “Oryx and Crake” opens with Snowman waking up in a tree wearing only a dingy bed-sheet. From that tree, he can hear the tide coming in. His watch, no longer working, shows “zero hour”. He rummages in his improvised food cache for his carefully horded scraps of food and devours an ant-ridden mango. It is clear that some sort of apocalypse had occurred, and Snowman is seemingly the only human survivor left.

Littering Atwood’s vision of this post-apocalyptic land are “things from before” – a hubcap, a piano key, an empty ChickieNobs Bucket O’Nubbins, a busted computer mouse. Peculiar, genetically engineered creatures like howling wolvogs and razor-tusked pigoons roam. So does the Crakers and the Children of Crake – gentle, naked humanoids created by Snowman’s ambitious friend Crake.

Enter this world in the near future, where humans, in the name of science, play God to disastrous consequences.

The story progresses through a series of flashbacks as Snowman recalls his past. We learn that he was once ‘Jimmy’, and he grew up in well-protected Compounds owned by companies. These Compounds are walled against the already environmentally degraded and dangerous world outside, now called pleeblands. It was in one of these Compounds that Jimmy met Crake, “Straight brown hair, tanned skin, green eyes, a half-smile, a cool gaze”. After school, the two boys played violent computer games and surfed online adult sites. There, both encountered the beautiful and exotic Oryx for the first time as a young girl.

The already-intricate relationships between the three complicate further with the development of the Paradice Project, where the Crakers served as prototypes for populations with pre-selected characteristics such as beauty, docility and immunity. In fact, the Crackers are simply devoid of any destructive features. They are un-racist and non-territorial. They are “perfectly adjusted to their habitat, so they would never have to create houses or tools or weapons, or, for that matter, clothing. They would have no need to invent any harmful symbolisms, such as kingdoms, icons, gods, or money. Best of all, they recycled their own excrement.” It is this Project that Atwood is gearing the readers up for, before the final leap into Snowman’s now-ruined world.

“Oryx and Crake” is Atwood’s second attempt, after a successful “The Handmaid’s Tale” in 1986, at what she calls speculative fiction. Atwood herself argues against the label of science fiction, stating that in the novel, there are “no intergalactic space travel, no teleportation, no Martians.” Both novels did not come up with new, futuristic inventions, but only works further from the premises of already existing inventions. And unlike the feminist nightmare of the “The Handmaid’s Tale”, “Oryx and Crake” is instead concerned with the path of destruction human beings are capable of bringing about in our dabbling of bioscience.

Unfortunately, “Oryx and Crake” has neither the absorbing quality of her earlier “The Handmaid’s Tale”, nor the haunting genius of Orwell’s “1984”. The novel is really less story telling than a tool for Atwood to make her point about the environmental dangers of certain scientific experiments, and their implications on humankind. Yet, as Swift’s quote in the beginning of the novel remind us, Atwood’s “principal design was to inform you, and not to amuse you”.

Despite this, “Oryx and Crake” is one novel that will leave you pondering the possibilities that might befall the human race if we continue on our relentless path of the potentially destructive bioscience.

Terrifying.

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