Margaret Atwood: Oryx and Crake
[Published in PLAYBACK:stl, July 2003]
It’s a lonely planet for Snowman, the tragic-comic hero of Margaret Atwood’s imaginative, playfully grim new novel, Oryx and Crake (Nan A. Talese / Doubleday). Draped in a foul bedsheet, he wakes in a tree near an ocean, voices in his head, struggling to face another day as the only man alive. “He doesn’t know which is worse,” Atwood writes, “a past he can’t regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly.”
Clarity’s in short supply for Snowman (as it is, in the book’s early sections, for the reader). He’s reeling from a serious one-two punch: first, a recent global plague has wiped the world pretty much clean; second, as he’s the world’s remaining human (he was in an air-locked bubble-dome while the plague played out), he’s become the reluctant leader for the genetically made Crakers, a rosy-minded troop of beings he escorted from the bubble-dome to an ocean-side village, after the world SARS’d out. A self-deprecating wallower now in the role of apostle, Snowman’s forced to explain to these Crakers life’s smaller matters, like existence and creation. (“Well, I owe them,” Snowman thinks to himself, after a Craker requests a particularly important bit of knowledge. “God of Bullshit, fail me not.”)
So how did Snowman get here, manning this post-apocalyptic fairyland? Atwood spends the majority of the novel answering this question, tracking back for long sections of back-story, which are then met with shorter scenes of the present. It’s a disorientating pace for the reader, but I’ll give Atwood the benefit of the doubt that it’s intentional – I suppose she wants us to feel how Snowman feels.
What we learn is that Snowman was once just a boy named Jimmy, heading through high school and college, and on to an underwhelming job churning out promotional copy for AnooYoo, a shady life-enhancement corporation. Since his early years, Jimmy had been under the spell of the bright but cold-minded Crake – best buds, they hung out and played games like the prophetically titled “Excintathon” – as well as Oryx, a delicate, angelic girl the two friends spotted trapped on screen in a smut site, whipped-cream face, flowers in her hair, and all-knowing eyes that penetrated Jimmy to the core.
Slumped in this depressing job at AnooYoo, Jimmy jumps at an offer to join the book’s title characters at a top-secret, cutting-edge compound called “Paradice.” Two Mr. Burns-level schemes are at work: one, to develop the BlyssPluss Pill, which would eliminate in those who took it the “external causes of death” (“misplaced sexual energy” being a biggie); and two, to develop the Crakers, a population of “spliced geniuses” with minds not burdened by ideas of race, territory, jealousy, anxiety, or mortality. (Crake argues that the last of these is not the act of dying, but the “foreknowledge” of dying; take that away, and you’ve got immortality. Thus, the Crakers have been programmed to drop dead at age thirty.) Neither of these schemes sits well with Jimmy, but with Oryx and Crake as the irresistible recruiters, into Paradice he goes. And, as you may imagine from this review’s beginning, it doesn’t go well.
An author of more than 30 books, Atwood pulls this complex tale together with skill. While its chronological shifts were fatiguing early on, the book gels at a certain point, particularly when, in the past, Jimmy enters Paradice and, in the present, Snowman leaves the beach to tour the ruined city he used to call home. And while Atwood comes off as indulgent and cutesy in her continual naming of the futuristic companies and web sites, she ultimately succeeds on two more significant levels. First, because of the salty playfulness of the book’s language, particularly Snowman’s “God of bullshit, fail me not”-style of coping, we often forget that he’s a character miserable, lonely, and starving; and when glimpses of this sorrow surface – Snowman limping toward the bubble-dome; his fleeting hope upon finding a windup radio – we feel his pain all the more deeply. And second, the author’s at times tiresome surface-treatment of the book’s futuristic elements is absolved by her continuous but subtle handling of one of the oldest elements of all – fire – providing a timeless gravitational plot point for this speculative fiction.
Early in the book – consulting the “burning scrapbook in his head” – Snowman recalls at length his first memory: a bonfire ravaging piles of animals. Later, re-visiting the burned-out buildings that surround Paradice, he recalls watching live video of the global plague’s aftermath – “the riots in the cities…the explosions as electrical systems failed…the fires no one came to extinguish.” And finally, in the book’s last pages, when Snowman has finished the tour of the city’s remains and circled back to the ocean-side village, he spies this ageless element again. He sees smoke. Then fire. And with reason we wonder: Is he really the last man alive?
