Margaret Atwood, "Oryx and Crake"

Oryx and Crake is a return to Margaret Atwood's dystopic themes, which I think we all missed in the many years since The Handmaid's Tale.  I love me a good dystopia, and Oryx and Crake is no exception.

Whereas The Handmaid's Tale was a story about an authoritarian religious government gone out of control, Oryx and Crake is about the trend towards commercialization of everything, even human life and basic genetics.  If religion was the bad guy in The Handmaid's Tale, science is the monster in the closet of Oryx and Crake.

The book takes place after an un-named apocalypse (a gambit which has recently become familiar again), and follows a hermit named Snowman, who takes up with a group of Crakers.  These are mutants which are similar to humans, and who help support Snowman because he can give them the answers that they seek to their questions about the world.  Snowman pre-dates the apocalypse, and is therefore able to answer their questions about that time.

Before the apocalypse, Snowman (then Jimmy) found himself in a love triangle with his best friend (Crake), and a woman named Oryx.  Crake grows up to be a brilliant bioengineer and mad scientist, while Jimmy studies liberal arts.

Crake ends up wiping out most of humanity with a virus, while creating a new kind of herbivorous human (the Crakers).  Oryx, originally hired by Crake as a prostitute and later as a teacher to the Crakers, ends up being their protector.  Both of them, dead now, exert a pressure on Snowman to stay with the Crakers and keep them safe.  

If Crake is the mad scientist, Snowman is the mad preacher.  He earns his keep from the Crakers by telling them stories about their gods, Oryx and Crake - Crake the creator, and Oryx the protector. Stories which are both completely wrong-headed, and utterly true.  The Crakers wait patiently for their gods to return, which obviously is never going to happen.

Oryx and Crake is a book about a world where science destroyed everything, and religion is a helpless fiction.  Is that bleak or what?  Ultimately I think it succeeds wonderfully as a dystopic tale, but fails as a novel.  Atwood imagines her dystopia perfectly, from the semi-abandonment of Jimmy and Crake's childhood, all the way through to the little details of Snowman's new life.  The anecdotes of genetic engineering gone horribly awry are absolutely perfect.  And the Crakers are fascinating - both as themselves, and as the reflection of a confused and angry but socially deficient scientist.  (The details of the Crakers' reproductive habits would provide ample fodder for Crake's psychiatrist, if there were any psychiatrists left in Atwood's world, much less a Crake.)

The story is told in interleaved flashbacks, which I often find frustrating.  It is a rare story that is improved by being told out of chronological order, and Oryx and Crake is not in that category.  To compound the problem, the "post-apocalypse/present day" storyline is not nearly as compelling as the "pre-apocalypse" story of Jimmy and Crake and Oryx.  The pre-apocalypse leads up to the destruction of the world, whereas the post-apocalypse story seems to ramble in an interesting if somewhat listless fashion.

Ultimately, Oryx and Crake is an uneven read, but a fairly good one.