Margaret Atwood – Oryx and Crake (2003)
Novel – 420 pages – my copy (paperback) bought from Amazon in 2008
- 4 nods out of 5 -
Oryx and Crake is a disturbing, frightening and entertaining dystopian vision of a possible future of mankind. Set in the no-so distant future, Atwood’s novel follows the life of a boy named Jimmy and his complex and fatal relationships with both Oryx and Crake.
A future in which a privileged few live in their own settlements, away from the pleeb-lands, working on genetic breakthroughs such as pigoons (with many hearts and livers, harvested for humans), wolvogs (the appearance of a dog but with the ferocity of a wolf) and the poor, doomed genetically deformed chickens who are fried for consumption in the form of ChickieNobs:
‘What they were looking at was a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing.
“What the hell is it?” said Jimmy
“Those are chickens,” said Crake. “Chicken parts. Just the breasts, on this one. They’ve got ones that specialize in drumsticks too, twelve to a growth unit.”…
“This is horrible,” said Jimmy. The thing was a nightmare. It was like an animal-protein tuber…
“No need for added growth-hormones,” said the woman, “the high growth rate’s built in. You get chicken breast in two weeks – that’s a three-week improvement on the most efficient low-light, high-density chicken farming operation so far devised. And the animal-welfare freaks won’t be able to say a word, because this thing feels no pain.”’
Yet most interesting, by far, is Crake’s own creation: the Crakers. Named after influential figures in history (such as Abraham Lincoln), they are programmed to ‘drop dead at the age of thirty – suddenly, without getting sick. No old age, none of those anxieties. They’ll just keel over’; no longer any racism due to their multi-colours, and:
‘Hierarchy could not exist among them, because they lacked the neural complexes that would have created it. Since they were neither hunters nor agriculturalists hungry for land, there was no territoriality: the king-of-the-castle hard-wiring that had plagued humanity had, in them, been unwired. They ate nothing but leaves and grass and roots and a berry or two; thus the foods were plentiful and always available. Their sexuality was not a constant torment to them, not a cloud of turbulent hormones: they came into heat at regular intervals, as did most mammals other than man.
In fact, as there would never be anything for these people to inherit, there would be no family trees, no marriages, and no divorces. They were 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…’
There are many themes within the book – consumerism, technological naivety – though perhaps the key is that of exploitation. Animals are exploited for human gain, the west world exploits the rest, and is Oryx is exploited in her childhood for the financial and sexual pleasure of others. It is this cruel world in which Crake interferes, giving dominance to his own exploited kind, the Crakers.
Atwood ties up this complex mix of ideas into a story well plotted and packed with suspense; we have Jimmy’s alienating childhood, his inability to succeed in the big world, the impending apocalypse, as well as the uncertain future when Jimmy is no longer Jimmy, and Snowman becomes the last bastion of human-kind:
‘Valance. Norn. Serendipity. Pibroch. Lubricious. When they’re gone out of his head, these words, they’ll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been’.
The novel ends on a cliff-hanger: a do or die moment. The reader is left musing over what becomes; though Atwood has put many a good reader out of their misery by returning to this world once more in a follow up book, Year Of The Flood. This Book Worm is off to purchase a copy, to delve back into the enlightening and chaotic world of Margaret Atwood.
