Oryx and Crake - review

Posted by Jim on October 1, 2005

I started this book since it was given to me based upon a review by Pugilist. He picked this up while at E3 this year and banged it out in a day or two - he was enthralled and could not put it down. I was the same way. But where Pugilist was in love with the book and the story I kept asking myself where was this thing going? From the beginning (no spoilers here but be careful one might slip in - you have been warned) we get a broken man on a beach surrounded by strange people and kids who pick up the debris of society and ask him what it is. So is this a WWII pilot on a tropical island? No, we get told right away that this is in the future - a time of advanced technology and medical research. So how in the future did these people not know of things like hub caps, cars and clothes? So this is a post apocalyptic world - we just don’t know what the apocalypse was, or is, or that is still going on, or how long ago, or where. And that long rambling question is what started all at once, and never answered until the very end of the book. The reader is kept going through the story wanting this answers. And at the end, these questions are still unanswered and even more questions are asked of our hero on the last page.

Our hero? Well that might be a hard word. The story is one of a futuristic world and a not as bright as the brightest who manages to survive till the end and beyond. I found him to be just some punk kid through the story, and a lackluster adult. Even in the end, his final duty is done out of promise rather then self drive. More a man moving with the tide then one standing at the tiller and steering into the wind and sea.
Lots of Internet porn, which must be how the future of the web will be. And some other items thrown in to show the degradation of the future world and how society accepts the green pristine worlds in glass camps next to the plebe lands. The plebe lands are for the common man or for the filth. We are left to wonder this till the very end. Just how far did the society class gaps extend?

We get a few small short stories intertwined. Snowman our hero in the deserted apocalyptic word, his life in the before time as Jimmy, his interactions with his friend Crake, and a child who becomes Oryx and her life in the blue of the world. Everywhere we turn it’s a bleak and filthy future. Yeah, positive thinking at its finest. We really don”t see much of Oryx herself - she haunts Snowman with memories of her past and the brief words they shared.
The book was enjoyable; would I recommend it to you? Um, no. I had these questions all through the book, and the questions is what kept me going rather then the story itself. I found the story to be fun but not deep. It’s a perfect airport trip to E3 and back book, and that’s why Pugilist had a good pick. But it is not a book you will ever reach a point where you put it down, go “wow”, and turn back a chapter and reread it again. 3 out of 5 stars.

Margaret Atwood
This is my first book from here, and looking over her other titles it looks like she rights poetry and some other books, many of which one first look are of the type known as “chick flick”. I will not add this author to my must get list. I just found the story interesting but not great. Cracker Barrel unabridged or abridged editions - pick it up if nothing else is on the rack. But don’t order it full for price. The ride is fun, but it’s short and not memorable or thought provoking.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0385503857/qid=1128219478/sr=8-2/ref=pd_bbs_2/103-2493691-0141422?v=glance&s=books&n=507846

From Publishers Weekly
Atwood has visited the future before, in her dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. In her latest, the future is even bleaker. The triple whammy of runaway social inequality, genetic technology and catastrophic climate change, has finally culminated in some apocalyptic event. As Jimmy, apparently the last human being on earth makes his way back to the RejoovenEssence compound for supplies, the reader is transported backwards toward that cataclysmic event, its full dimensions gradually revealed. Jimmy grew up in a world split between corporate compounds (gated communities metastasized into city-states) and plebe lands (unsafe, populous and polluted urban centers). His best friend was “Crake,” the name originally his handle in an interactive Net game, Extinctathon. Even Jimmy’s mother-who ran off and joined an ecology guerrilla group when Jimmy was an adolescent-respected Crake, already a budding genius. The two friends first encountered Oryx on the Net; she was the eight-year-old star of a pedophilic film on a site called HottTotts. Oryx’s story is a counterpoint to Jimmy and Crake’s affluent adolescence. She was sold by her Southeast Asian parents, taken to the city and eventually made into a sex “pixie” in some distant country. Jimmy meets Oryx much later-after college, after Crake gets Jimmy a job with ReJoovenEsence. Crake is designing the Crakers-a new, multicolored placid race of human beings, smelling vaguely of citron. He’s procured Oryx to be his personal assistant. She teaches the Crakers how to cope in the world and goes out on secret missions. The mystery on which this riveting, disturbing tale hinges is how Crake and Oryx and civilization vanished, and how Jimmy-who also calls himself “the Snowman,” after that other rare, hunted specimen, the Abominable Snowman-survived. Chesterton once wrote of the “thousand romances that lie secreted in The Origin of Species.” Atwood has extracted one of the most hair-raising of them, and one of the most brilliant.

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