Jimmy went to school with Crake back in the 2030s, both of them sons of scientific whiz-brains who live in imperial luxury in one of the Compounds, super-gated communities run by the companies that have replaced any kind of central government. How they all got there is described in an elaborate series of flashbacks throughout the novel. We first meet Jimmy (Snowman, as he calls himself) living in rags by the seaside, going half-mad with isolation, forgetting dozens of beautiful old words each day, and baby-sitting a new tribe of perfect humanoids who have been genetically modified by the arch-fiend Crake to survive the end of civilization. If there’s an emptiness at the core of the story, it has to do with her choice of protagonist. It’s a broad canvas that allows Atwood to show off her brilliant talent for satire and wordplay, as well as her considerable love and knowledge of the natural world. That’s close enough to the present for us to be able to recognize the seeds of catastrophe in our morning newspaper.Įnvironmental degradation, global warming, and the resultant floods up the East Coast (Harvard has drowned) provide the backdrop, but the central action involves our most disturbing current headlines: cloning and genetic manipulation, toxic microbes and viruses, and a culture that has handed all the important decisions over to the “numbers people.” It’s a story about The End of Civilization As We Know It, but the event is coming up very soon – around the year 2050, it seems, from the hints Atwood provides. Oryx and Crake, fortunately, falls closer to the former than the latter. The worst would be a replay of the planet Zycron sections of The Blind Assassin, with their three suns and virgin sacrifices and zorch-ray death guns. The best would be a revisiting of the dystopian darkness she explored in her 1985 masterpiece, The Handmaid’s Tale, a novel that grows more prescient with each passing year. When word got around that Margaret Atwood’s 11th novel was going to be a work of speculative fiction‚ her readers probably hoped for the best but feared the worst.

Oryx book