Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake
Oryx and Crake is Margaret Atwood’s second speculative-fiction novel. The first was The Handmaid’s Tale, also my first experience with a Margaret Atwood’s novel, back in 1989 or 1990.
In Oryx and Crake, we meet Snowman, the main character of the novel, a survivor in a post-apocalyptic world. We understand very soon the importance of two characters in Snowman’s (Jimmy as he was called then) past: Oryx and Crake, but we will learn about them progressively, since they are both central to everything that happened to the world.
Through flashbacks, Snowman remembers his previous life, beginning with his childhood, as Jimmy the misunderstood literary son (a quality not much valued in a world which puts the emphasis on scientific progress aimed at making people living longer and looking younger) of two scientific parents. His flashback continues with his teenage years, spent with his best friend scientific genius Oryx, watching porn and violence on the Internet, and then as a student, in a second-class Arts university, and later, as an adult, on the verge of witnessing the end of things as he has known them.
In the present, Snowman has a task, which he undertakes with a mixture of seriousness and cynicism… At this point, I feel that telling more about the plot would be spoiling it. Oryx and Crake is a masterful novel dealing with the concept of science without conscience. It raises the question of ethic, but also of the survival of humanity itself. As Jimmy/Snowman asks: "How much is too much? How far is too far?"
In the pre-apocalyptic society where Jimmy grew up, a society on the verge of collapse, divided between the wastelands that are the Pleeblands (Plebe lands), and the Compounds, where the elite lives secluded and safe, the first thing to go, announcing the collapse of the whole, is art and culture: as Crake, the practical and enigmatic scientific, states (and behind it we recognize Atwood’s particular sense of humor): male artists are only fulfilling a biological function, like frogs, amplifying themselves to get the girl. As for female artists, who have no such claim, they are just "biologically confused". In this diseased civilization, not only is art left to rot, but language is also lost, there is a "dissolution of meaning". Jimmy, as a publicist, invents words, more and more daring creations, but his deed goes undiscovered, as long as they "sounded scientific and had a convincing effect." Jimmy himself is loosing his grip on language and on meaning: ""I used to be a erudite" he says out loud. Erudite. A hopeless word. What are all those things he once thought he knew, and where have they gone?"
Of course Atwood’s speculative world is too close to reality for comfort. The games like "Blood and Roses", or "Barbarian Stomp", are not much of an exaggeration of what already exists. The impoverishment of language reminds us of what happens today with the use of sms, and the pseudonyms, which everybody seems to use in the novel, reminds of a practice still limited to Internet. In the novel, people change names, they reinvent themselves. Like words, they have lost their meanings too. Oryx represents the extreme of this "empty-shell" syndrome: if Crake customizes through genetics, Jimmy is as bad, in a way. He recreates Oryx to fit his fantasy. In this crumbling world, people are not fixed, they change their names, their personalities, as if "unique, self-created, self-sufficient" (with a clear reference to Milton’s Paradise Lost). The part concerning Oryx’s (real? imagined?) past is particularly uncomfortable. No speculative fiction here, a story that could be true, in many Asian countries. We realize how few would be necessary to slip into Atwood’s nightmare…
I remember loving The Blind Assassin, but regretting the fact that the ending was spelled out for the reader. Atwood did not make the same mistake here, the ending is open, leaving room for the reader to speculate about Jimmy’s choices…
Oryx and Crake is one of those fascinating, unforgettable novel which reminds me why reading is my favorite activity. A real masterpiece of speculative literature…
Rating: 5/5
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