REVIEW: ORYX AND CRAKE

ERIC'S REVIEW

What the hell is Margaret thinking? We have been Atwooded. On her book tour to promote Oryx and Crake a few years back, she unveiled her Long Pen technology, which allowed remote writing by robots. She is head of a high tech company with the same aim called Syngrafii. She has written a book which will not be published until 2114, and which will require what she calls paleo-anthropologists to translate it. She maintains that she is not a science fiction writer, but a writer of  speculative fiction. Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen, she has said. Nonetheless the book O&C has monsters. Real monsters. We call them humans.

So what is Oryx and Crake, exactly? It is not a love story. None of the characters really provoke a reaction. It is not a story about life and death. It is a story of life and death. It asks the question: what is life?, and tells of the death of society, or man as a species.

And why? The usual suspects. Sex. Greed. Selfishness. Vanity. Hubris. There is love, of a fashion, but no passion. 

The story is about the dystopia the Earth has become because of the monkeying around with nature that man has been doing. Planet of the Apes-esque. The main character is Snowman, aka Jimmy, the lone (or is he?) human survivor of science gone mad. Crake is the evil genius behind the whole mess, but he is just an amped-up version of the way modern man is heading. GM foods. DNA engineering. Internet porn. Mind control. You know, just a typical day on the planet. Mixing animals has gone awry. Pigoons. Wolvogs. Snats. All very nasty. The best of the worst. Or is it the best of the wurst. Jimmy is reduced to living in the trees and surviving off of tins of Vienna sausages and the like. The earth is shite, and global warming has conspired with pandemics to make it pretty much uninhabitable. Picketty-style inequality had taken over completely anyway before the apocolypse, with bubbleland gated villages for the elite surrounded by pleeblands. In the end it is only the mutant Crakers who remain. And Jimmy. His love or should I say the object of his love, Oryx, is a vision, not a person. And when she cops it. Oh well, who cares?

All it takes, says Crake, is the elimination of one generation....Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it is game over. Forever. 

Game over. The earth is a mephitic mess (look it up! When man as a species dies, it is only words and art which remain).

The doctrine of unintended consequences is in full spate, as Jimmy observes. Atwood is not a cheer leader for humanity. More like a Cassandra. Pay attention, she is saying. This could (will) happen to you. 

All too topical and depressing, really. But plausible. At the end, I was reminded of the lyrics to a country music song. I don't know whether to kill myself or go bowling. 

So I went bowling. Figuratively, that is. 

3.5 stars