Oryx and Crake (The MaddAddam Trilogy)

Since MaddAddam, the concluding book in the trilogy which begins with Oryx and Crake, just came out it seemed like an ideal time to reread the other two books in the trilogy. I am really excited to see what Margaret Atwood does with MaddAddam given that Oryx and Crake and its follow-up, The Year of the Flood are so different in focus. Or, that's how I remember them; I'm just about to crack The Year of the Flood back open, so we'll see if that opinion still stands when I've finished it.Back to Oryx and Crake. The plot is relatively straightforward: we follow a man named Jimmy from childhood to adulthood whose childhood friend and later employer, Crake, is a mad scientist. And we follow Jimmy as he tries to navigate a post-apocalyptic world caused by Crake. The book opens some years after this mad scientist has done his thing. Jimmy is both alone and not alone--Crake created an enhanced group of human beings, genetically lab-grown to perfectly fit their surroundings where Crake did his best to splice out `undesirable' elements of the human fabric. Jimmy tends to these people, whom he calls the Crakers, who are human but such a different kind of human that he is still utterly alone.The narrative structure is split between chapters set in Jimmy's present, where he tends to the Crakers, and his past, which explores the world which led up to the birth of the Crakers and the destruction of everyone else. But the story is very clearly rooted in Jimmy's present; the chapters set in the past have a deliberate haziness to them, and Jimmy interjects commentary on his memories. Atwood makes it clear that rather than an objective narrative jump to the past what we are reading is present-day Jimmy remembering his own past. Like Winterson's Weight, this book explores the nature of narrative and how we use interpretations of our past to construct our own futures.The idea of art and narrative as hard-wired into human beings, as one of the intangible things that makes us human, is a theme in the book. Jimmy is a self-described `word person' in a world where words no longer get you very far. Atwood's future is a destroyed and severely overpopulated Earth where capitalism has run amok. Global warming has ruined the climate, leading to the destruction of many major cities. Class is clearly defined by occupation--the upper classes, uniformly technical and biological geniuses working in elite labs at elite corporations, live in sealed-off and secure corporate communities. There, these scientists are protected from the biological warfare and espionage from competing companies. The middle class live in Modules, and everyone else lives in the pleeblands. Jimmy, the product of two elite scientists, grows up in corporate compounds. The pleeblands are places of myth, of seductive legend, to him and as a reader we see very little of how the poor in Atwood's world live*. So, there's Jimmy, who lacks his parents' capacity for numbers and science stuck in places that do not value his gift for empathy and wordplay. Coupled with his best friend Glenn (who becomes Crake), who is an obvious wunderkind, and Jimmy is left with an inferiority complex the size of Texas.I read this book the year it came out, in 2003. I remember being somewhat fascinated by it but not liking it much, which was disappointing as I was and still am a major Atwood fan. I was in Boston, living on the couch of a friend and elbows-deep in a summer of socialist organizing. I'd scored a s***ty summer job on campus which I abandoned on the spur of the moment to couch-surf and read a lot of Trotsky and argue with people about whether we, as socialists, should support and campaign for Ralph Nader. I was driving a lot of conversations about masculinity in activist spaces and how it was alienating female members of our organization. This was the summer I began to embrace my proletariat roots instead of trying to shed them; a moment, if you'll indulge me, of internal class crisis. I picked up Oryx and Crake for some light reading, and frankly I picked it up at the wrong moment in my life. Jimmy, as a narrator, was not someone I could connect to at that moment in my life--his male, upper-class privileged voice and viewpoint was simply a bridge too far. The worldbuilding was fascinating as it dovetails so nicely with Marxist theories of late-stage capitalism and imperialism but I never developed an emotional connection with the book.I read it now as someone ten years older. As someone who has, in some very real sense, sold out. I'm middle class now, a thing which I struggle with but is very obviously true. I'm reading it again after doing some heavy-duty renovation on my own psychological landscape which has left me a much more compassionate and less judgmental person. This time around, I connected much more with Jimmy, especially his imposter syndrome. My initial reading of the book as a self-righteous 19 year old was that it lacked depth, that is was a bit obvious. But I'm not sure that's true. It's certainly the case that Atwood as a writer creates stark worlds where Things Have Gone So Very Wrong, but it's also true that within those worlds she's a writer of immense subtlety. I mean to say that the worlds she creates are not subtle, but that the people within them still are. This book, I think, is less a warning about capitalism run rampant or the dangers of playing god with science. I think it's more about the things that Crake tried and failed to breed out of his batch of `perfected' humans: our capacity and need for story, for meaning. I think this is a book about what happens to a culture where we abandon art, where our creative meaning-making of the world around us is seen as less-than and unnecessary. When we do that, Atwood seems to say, we lose our souls. In a sense, then, our compulsion to create and to describe and to enrich is intimately tied with our embedded altruism. All of which is to say that I understand better now why Atwood chose hapless Jimmy, word-oriented and patient Jimmy as her narrator. He's not a good man, but he's an exceedingly human one.*Or, more accurately, we see very little of how the poor live in Oryx and Crake. We see a whole lot more of life in the pleeblands in The Year of the Flood.

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).

Brilliant book written by one of the most significant writers of our time. I've read this book several times, along with the other books in the MaddAddam trilogy (The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam). These act as prequel and sequel to the story depicted here in Oryx and Crake so once you've read this book you just have to read the others.Oryx and Crake reads like an alien play set in world of ecological and human devastation where the results of scientific experiments threaten survivors. It is the most abstract book of the trilogy. When I first read it, Margaret Atwood was still working on the second and final parts. I remember not being able to wait until I could follow up on this strange, cruel story. We don't know much about the world in this book, other than it has become hostile and frightening but right from the start we do identify and care for Snowman, the main character and the human condition he portrays. It's one version of our future and I itched to know how we got there. If you like science fiction and can suspend your need to have a full explanation as to why each thing happens, do read this book. The issues Margaret Atwood raises are significant and relevant to our lives today - some you'll find more difficult to accept than others but Atwood's writing is so seductive, she can challenge us and make us think about what is happening in society whilst immersing us into an absorbing fictional world

I think this is a great book. If you like dystopian &/or post-apocalyptic novels then you are sure to like this. It is very well written, of course. (Well, it's Margaret Atwood - what would you expect!)I love the way that the novel flit's back and forth in time, threading the whole story together from both ends. The characters are great and well written - it centers around Jimmy/Snowman, but all other characters are well explored and tyou get a real feeling for how & why they end up as/where they do. The descriptions of the future presented here are disturbing, but also it is easy to see how you could get to there from here. This is presented as a credible near-future vision, which makes it all the more scary.So, I liked it very much and I recommend it. I will add that this is the first of a trilogy and I have to say that the second book  MaddAddam  did not grab me quite as much, but worth giving a go also if you want to continue the story (albeit via a different set of characters). MaddAddam

Brilliant ideas as Atwood is brave enough to observe our free market technological excesses that make fascism look like an old and shy experiment. Children are encouraged to desensitise themselves from violence and sadism through live online pedo porn and snuff (execution) videos.However as with Angela Carter I have a problem relaxing with the book and loving its voice as the style is a knotted rope of nouns that makes me feel like I am reading German and TV advertising or worse: a German TV advert! It is noun after noun, with phonetic catchiness ("Rejoovenate" etc) which to a European other language native speaker looks like an ugly barrier but also like computer programming code. Sci FI used to be beautifully written and have longer - deeper-meaning bearer- sentences but since the US TV communication mode took over all forms of oral communication in English speaking countries, most sci fi and dystopian futuristic novels are written like a script skeleton, like a bare structure for a literary writer to re write. I am aware that after reading Primo Levi, Aldous Huxley, Arthur Rimbaud and Alain Fournier and also the great Rene Barjavel, contemporary English -language sci FI or fantasy literature looks brutally or economically written when in fact Atwood has as much talent as all these writers, it is just the literary standards of the market that dictate this (to me, dry and short) style.

This is novel within the so-called category of speculative fiction. It is written in brilliantly effervescent prose about an apocalyptic scenario, the near annihilation of the human species. We enter it after the apocalypse has already taken place and, in essence, the story retraces the events that led to it. Since this is Atwood, we can tentatively assume that her interest are unlikely to reflect the Armageddon per se but rather the potential for applying a magnifying glass to what it means, for good or for bad, to be human.Our reader-friendly narrator is the jokily self-depreciative Snowman - Jimmy in a former life. Jimmy's remorseful and backward-directed eyes, unstable emotions, and scatological humour guide us through the disquieting genesis of the catastrophe. Sleeping in a tree to avoid predation, he is far from happy to find himself one of a handful of survivors. Devastated by guilt, resentful of what new role might be expected of him in this brave new world of scarcity and danger, he gazes angrily at the drowned skyscrapers of a former great American city in the bay opposite his roost, haunted by what part he himself might have played in the catastrophe and pining for the happiness he has lost.The Oryx and Crake of the title were his best, and most formative, friends dating back, at least in the case of Crake, to the world of his adolescence. But as the narrative unwinds we discover that this world was already morally bankrupt. Walled-off and guarded compounds accommodated the super-rich, isolating them from the semi-feral "pleeb-lands" beyond. Wealth, and social status, was centred on profit-driven genetic engineering of animals, and even humans, for sundry disreputable purposes including body parts. In Snowman's sceptical, oft-times parodic, memories of his childhood, schooling and dysfunctional family, we witness a world already hurtling down the slippery slope. His mother, herself a scientist working in genetic engineering, abandons him during a conscience-driven breakdown. Little in the way of direct explanation is offered in the narrative so we are obliged to interpret her motivations and actions through her baffled and less than devoted son. We also witness, through the wonderfully scatter-brained and sex-addicted adolescent male ruminations of Jimmy, the inanely stupid potentials of genetic engineering in a world devoid of moral compass. The hugely altered pigoons (transgenic pigs), the threatening wolfogs, and the people-friendly rakunks ( hybrids of raccoons and skunks), typify the brainless experimentation and greedy exploitation.Atwood employs a formidable arsenal of literary skills to enliven her narrative, including crystal clear language, cutting edge street talk, the spiritual leprosy of internet pornography, arresting neologisms, and, as with Snowman, a relentless, desperately ironic viewpoint. Indeed, with Jimmy/Snowman she may have created one of the noteworthy characters of modern literature.The rise to self-assertive pragmatism of the delightful and mysterious and quintessentially oriental Oryx from the vilest degradation to pragmatic human being is the second great characterisation. Of the key characters in the book, I have to admit that she is the one I would most like to share a conversation with over a bacon sandwich and glass or three of Cognac.While dystopia and apocalypse is hardly novel as a theme, this is a disturbing, highly original and yet still highly entertaining foray into that seductive darkness. One senses, and identifies with both the anger and challenging spirit that drives the novel.Sent from an internet café in the Canaries October 29 2013

Okay, to contrast a few of the opinions already expressed about this book: I don't care if a book is derivative or shocking, I don't mind swearing, I don't mind graphic scenes of sex and/or violence, and I certainly don't mind suspending disbelief for a few hours. I'm not a literary type and essentially, first and foremost, what I'm looking for in fiction is at least one character I can like and an engaging storyline.I liked the characters of Jimmy and Crake, and I liked (reading about) the future-world that Ms Atwood placed them in. We were off to a good start!I didn't understand the point of the Crakers, other than the blindingly obvious. I'm fairly sure I missed something there, some symbolism or deeper truth: but what was it? I felt, as some others have mentioned, that the character of Oryx was a bit thin, and defined more through Jimmy's eyes than in its own right.There was, for me, a definite disconnect between the humourlessness of the plot/setting and the quirky, amusing names handed to all manner of entities throughout the text. For me, this got more annoying towards the final third of the book.The ending was where I really lost my bearings. It just..ends, and again, I couldn't find any meaning to it.I don't regret reading the book - it was a fun little dip into Ms Atwood's vision of a future. She researched the scientific material well and I was convinced, she used a well-worn plot - but stamped her mark on it and she created some interesting characters to carry the load of moving the story along. I just can't shake the feeling that either the book isn't that deep - or my brain isn't sufficiently powerful to plumb its depths.So, overall, an "I liked it" four stars.I'm off to try and find an analysis of this book - and also to order my copy of Ronald Wright's novel "A Scientific Romance" - which I've seen mentioned a few times in other reviews as a worthy contender/superior.