Oryx and Crake

One day, something is going to be the end of the world as we know it. Superbacteria and/or a global plague. Nuclear war. Heck, maybe the zombie apocalypse. But why not climate change? In Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, it's climate that creates the void into which increasingly powerful corporations pour themselves. Soon, the divide between the haves and the have-nots becomes even more literal, with the highly-educated few retreating into city-esque complexes created and owned by business interests, while the masses are walled off into their own zones. Jimmy is born into privilege, to a mother and father who are good worker bees, and it is in the compound school that he meets Glenn, who becomes his best friend...and who ends up changing the world beyond what anyone could have imagined.

As an adult, Jimmy has renamed himself Snowman (after The Abominable), and as far as he knows, he's the last “real” human left alive. There's a group of genetically engineered people, the Children of Crake, but they're not the same. He's left alone, in a devastated world, with only his memories and his guilt over the role he played in it all. These memories make up the bulk of the book, with very little actually happening in an actual plot sense. Jimmy does venture back to the last place he lived in search of food and sunscreen and medicine, which forces him to confront what happened with Glenn, who became Crake, and the beautiful, reserved Oryx, who was involved with them both. How they died, and how the virus that wreaked havoc on the rest of the world was released.

It's a character study as much as a work of speculative fiction, and that's really Atwood's strength anyways. She loves to dig into the ways our little flaws can set in motion events that spiral out of control, to take the tensions underlying society and drag them up into the open. I find it really interesting that this book was written in 2003, the year I graduated high school, because so much of it seems to apply to the kinds of debates that continue to be relevant even now: just because we have the technology or knowledge to do something, does that mean we should? How do we weigh morality? Whose morality gets weighed? The writing date of the book does mean there are some things that come off anachronistic (she posits a world focused on disc-based storage, in which email is a primary communication method), a lot of it is startlingly prescient.

Clearly I liked it, but it was not without failings. The biggest, for me, was its lack of developed female characters. Jimmy's mother is intriguing, but we see relatively little of her and through mostly his eyes, reflecting on the way her choices impacted him. Oryx remains to the reader just as mystifying as she largely is to Jimmy, and while I could see Atwood intending this as a statement of how men tend to project their own stories only the women they claim to love (Jimmy is convinced he knows parts of Oryx's past, which she herself denies), I wish we'd gotten more of her perspective. And as much as I enjoy character-driven novels, I wish it had been structured differently, so that it was taking place in the present rather than largely in the past. These are relatively minor issues, though. On the whole, this book is fascinating and thought-provoking and one I'd recommend widely (though maybe not younger/less sophisticated teenagers).

I rarely do this, but I abandoned this book just about 3/4 of the way through.

I realized that I just wasn't enjoying it anymore. Atwood's dystopia is a broad caricature of a hyper-capitalist future filled with clichéd, George Saunders-esque portmanteau satires on corporate naming (CorpSeCorps, Pigoon). With a more generous scholar's eye I can see how that vision may have been prescient and counter-cultural when it was published in 2003 in the shadow of 9/11, but dystopia has been fleshed out and deconstructed in media in the years since, and now it reads as flat and thinly characterized.

Her imagination of a teen boyhood in which these adolescents have been so numbed to exploitation that child pornography, executions, and animal torture are treated as normal entertainment options among many seems heavily influenced by A Clockwork Orange and maybe this is my old age speaking—one of the great surprises of adulthood is learning that I basically have no interest in the hyper-violent media that would have lit me up in high school—but I think that Clockwork came out of a particular context and it's assumptions about how culture and morality interact should be looked at a little more critically than they are in Oryx and Crake.

One more critique:

I thought the whole storyline involving how the boys "met" Oryx was tasteless and irresponsible. There are many real life stories about men getting obsessed by girls they encounter in porn, and I think that there's a certain seriousness and gravity to those stories that demand good, rigorous storytelling if they are to be fictionalized.