Book Review, Take II: Oryx and Crake

First the update on me-me-me and my little laptop, known affectionately as The POG, or Piece Of Garbage, which I've wanted to replace since approximately half an hour after I turned it on. I'm not sure what's to blame or what else to try, but, whatever I do, all private Internet connections I've tried (I've tested those of three friends for whose service I was not paying, as well as one where I was) have seemed dysfunctional compared with those public computer places we're not supposed to use any more. The connection I'm using right now runs, when it runs at all, as if the electrons were being transferred by ones. 

That's by way of introduction to this review. This is the version of the review I attempted to schedule for the eleventh of May on the ninth of May. It was impossible to get this version into the Blogspot draft; after a few tries it became impossible to do anything on any of the internal pages within Blogspot--not read friends' blogs, not check page view count, not any thing. Then Blogspot went ahead and posted an earlier draft anyway...Feh. 

Lesson learned: Never pay for private Internet connections. All reliable Internet connections are in town where they are reserved for corporate-owned buildings. Walk into town and use those.

Anyway, here's the final draft: 

Title: Oryx and Crake

Author: Margaret Atwood

Publisher: Doubleday

Date: 2003

ISBN: 0-385-50385-7

Length: 383 pages

Quote: “He feels the need to hear a human voice…The salt water is running down his face again. He never knows when that will happen and he can never stop it.”

That’s Snowman, also known as Jimmy and as Thickney, trying to keep his sanity after reckless gene splicing, climate change, and pollution have made our world inhospitable to humans. Oryx and Crake, his friends, are dead and Snowman is remembering their friendship in painful detail, trying to keep himself alive, not really sure why. (At his last job the employees code-named themselves after extinct species. Snowman was into drugs, all right, and has behaved abominably, but he never liked “Thickney.”) Snowman is anything but a survivalist and his reactions to having been forced to become one are laughable, though this novel is kind enough to save the most coffee-snorting lines for the jokes the characters make.

In this possible future several bioengineered animal species have turned out to be hazardous to humans. Jimmy’s best friend Crake, the science genius, has bioengineered a tribe of fast-maturing humanoids who produce an odor that repels most of the new predators, but they’re not human enough for Snowman to enjoy being around them. His “one true love” Oryx, who learned several other languages before she learned English, taught the new humanoid race to speak English in their peculiar way. They call themselves the Children of Crake, and the animals the Children of Oryx. In addition to their repellent odor and biologically different brain wiring, the Children of Crake mature faster than humans, and are able to reproduce (possibly) once in three years. Crake meant them to be happier and healthier than humans are, but you probably wouldn’t enjoy being alone with them any more than Snowman does. They’ve made it possible for him to survive the first few months of grief for the loss of all the nearby humans, but they’re not wired to understand the way humans think.

The real plot and meaning of this book are in its past tense: how humans damaged the world and may have wiped themselves out as a species. There’s a hint of a present-tense plot, when Snowman finds that other humans have survived, but how long any of them will last is waiting for the sequels. There’s abundant food for thought and discussion about whether all humans are, like the three who are developed as characters in this book, mostly sympathetic characters who react to life stress by doing horrible things to one another; whether that’s the same view of humanity Atwood has taken in other novels, whether it should be described as a pessimistic view or a compassionate view.

A question an English teacher might want to discuss is whether this book is excellent science fiction, or not “really” science fiction (it’s not about the science fiction clichés of spaceships, time travel, and alien planets). Like 1984, Brave New World, Out of the Silent Planet, or Woman on the Edge of Time, Oryx and Crake qualifies as good “literary fiction” about the human condition (and it’s full of literary and cultural references, too—Snowman was a commercial art major, Crake prints literary quotes on refrigerator magnets); but there’s a lot of serious science in it.

Relative to the time when it was written I’d even include the climate warming model promulgated by Al Gore as serious scientific speculation. It turned out not to be accurate science, but at the time it was science. In this book Florida has drowned; Texas has dried up and blown away; we see Jimmy shading himself from the fierce heat in a future “New New York” that’s unrecognizably developed but probably used to be Toronto—and computers, unsettlingly, still work just the way the best ones did in 2001, probably using Windows ME.

In the school year 2003-4 I remember reading this novel, handing it to my husband, and agreeing that we would never put it on a reading list, but would tell students that it’s grim dystopian science fiction with snarky jokes and porn stars in it. It seemed that relevant. It still does, to me, though it doesn’t seem to have caught as much attention as The Handmaid’s Tale. Both books are basically warnings about the nasty places where some current trends are likely to lead. They’re not feel-good reading, and both books end with some question about how long the protagonist is going to survive, but thinking about the ideas these books present can help you motivate yourself to make the rather difficult, nonconformist choices to resist the trends that might make our world even slightly more like these fictional worlds than it already is.

One difference between Atwood’s major works of, oh right, speculative fiction, may influence some readers’ choice of which to buy first. In The Handmaid’s Tale sex acts take place and are described in some detail, but the point of those descriptions is that none of the participants in these sex acts is having much fun. In Oryx and Crake, although humans were meant to mate in pairs rather than triads, the three Bright Young Things love each other with the destructive bipolar intensity of youth, and Oryx is hotter than a two-dollar pistol and sweeter than cherry wine. She’s been a porn star and a prostitute, but what makes her stand out is a radically, heroically Buddhist worldview, a detachment with compassion, that showed on her face before she was even half grown. Crake, who may have Asperger’s Syndrome or may merely be reacting to a horrific childhood, and Jimmy, the admitted sex addict, really do love her for her pure soul—the part of it that is pure, anyway. So there’s that.

Bioengineered virus? This web site is staying as far away from the current unverified rumors as it can get, but it’s a topic we need to be thinking about, perhaps best as the kind of hypothetical future possibility it is in Oryx and Crake and other good speculative fiction.

Corporations taking over the functions of government in a global economy? You know it would happen; that’s one reason to oppose any movement toward “globalizing” anything, arguably even to limit corporate operations to one nation (or state). A “communist” economy where a Big Government authorizes only one Big Corporation to produce each type of its products is, of course, even more hopelessly enslaved to corporate greed than other kinds of economy are.

(A quick update: Consider what Bayer’s doing today, which is not all that different from things other corporations did in the late twentieth century. While stalling payments intended to help very sick patients pay for treatment with the intention that many of those patients would die, and getting my very mild, moderate, peaceable and bipartisan Glyphosate Awareness chats censored on Twitter, Bayer promised to pull “Roundup” off the market at least in the United States. They continued marketing the same formula under different labels in other countries. Now, while the Biden Administration makes noises about being Green, including the old movement-killer stereotype about being too Green to bathe, the Biden Administration has allowed “Roundup” to be returned to the U.S. market. One way to trace the bewilderingly varied effects glyphosate may have on your family is to notice how much better you felt in 2020, when less of this particular poison was in your air and water. How much relief you had from chronic health problems, physical or mental, that your doctor probably hesitated to ascribe to glyphosate—a poison that has as many different effects as glyphosate is known to have, obviously, has to work with individuals’ genetic weaknesses. And one way to confirm the degree to which the symptoms of these chronic conditions have been aggravated by glyphosate is to notice how much ground everyone loses this summer.

Even in the Glyphosate Awareness movement we have a lot of people who want to make this kind of corporate control of government into a partisan political issue, use glyphosate as something for which to blame the Democrats (because glyphosate pollution got out of hand during the Obama Administration) or the Republicans (because Trump actively denied and resisted Glyphosate Awareness)—but glyphosate is better understood as an illustration of how corporate funders attach little strings to all political parties. A totalitarian monopoly, of course, operates almost the same way a corporation that has to stay competitive does, except that the totalitarian monopoly has even lower standards, both for product quality and for ethics.

In 2003, of course, nobody knew that Al Gore’s vision of “global warming” was going to be as wrong as corporate promises that glyphosate was safe. Those of us whose minds are not stuck in the 1930s know those things now. When present-time “Greens” are still blathering about “climate change” and ignoring glyphosate, they are self-identifying as Soros’ corporate dependents, not to be trusted on ecological questions. True Greens know that local warming is real, and a real problem in places where it’s been allowed to develop, but glyphosate—and gene splicing, and overpopulation, and other things—are more serious problems for the whole world.)

Perversions of sex and perversions of religion dominated the dystopian vision in The Handmaid’s Tale. Those perversions are still present in Oryx and Crake, though they’re not the focus of attention. The women in Oryx and Crake have jobs and money and the freedom to act out their own perverted fantasies. Nobody seems to think less of Oryx—if anything they admire her more—for having fondled all those older men in those Hott Totts videos; the married women who enable Snowman’s sex addiction don’t seem concerned about being beheaded, or even divorced. (As is typical for Atwood, the discussion of sex is usually PG-13, a comment on characters’ relationship here and a dirty joke there. Details are made clear only when a sex act is really grotesque, like the violence-porn in Bodily Harm and the unnatural relationships in The Handmaid’s Tale.) Nevertheless, kiddie porn is alive and well; while Oryx is appearing in it, Snowman and Crake are avidly watching it. Religion is not much talked about in Oryx and Crake, except that Crake claims to believe neither in God nor in Nature, Oryx is quietly but splendidly Buddhist, and Snowman certainly can’t be described as a Christian even though that’s what his grandparents probably claimed to be. Possibly it’s the absence of talk about God in the culture that allows characters like Crake to “play God” by tampering with DNA. The Children of Crake weren’t supposed to have “spirituality centers” in their brains. Snowman enjoys the irony, even thinks of it as a kind of revenge on Crake, that they obviously do have numinous feelings they project onto Oryx and Crake, who are clearly developing into the Goddess and God of Craker mythology, and (more unsettlingly for him) Snowman, too, who seems already to be a demigod and may become a Devil or Trickster. As in The Handmaid’s Tale, the perversions of the future are more or less logical developments of present-time perversions.

Both books are triumphs of the writer’s art. Both make mercifully improbable, hypothetical future conditions feel real. Characterizations are credible. Dialogue is lifelike. If you liked the literary skill and/or the willingness to confront unpleasant thoughts in one, you’ll probably like those things in the other book, though there’s no connection among the characters or events; each book generated its own sequel.