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Oryx and Crake.
Atwood, Margaret (author).
May 2003. 400p. Doubleday/Nan A. Talese, hardcover, $26 (0-385-50385-7).
REVIEW.
First published March 15, 2003 (Booklist).
Surely Atwood deserved a respite after The Blind Assassin(2000) won the Booker Prize, but the muse had more to say, hence this hijack-intense speculative novel, sister to one of Atwood’s most indelible works, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Jimmy is struggling to stay alive on a wreckage-littered Earth besieged by a brutal sun and overrun with smart and vicious test-tube-bred predators. Now calling himself Snowman (as in Abominable), he’s preparing for an arduous scavenger expedition back to the formerly high-tech compound in which he lived and worked until the bioengineering industry ran amok and a catastrophic event put an end to civilization. Snowman is desperately lonely, but he isn’t actually alone since he serves as guru for a strangely passive tribe unaware of the lost world of computers, bullet trains, Web porn, gene-splicing, and the plagues that Snowman so vividly and regretfully recalls. As Snowman remembers his friend, Crake, an emotionally remote genius, as well as the love of Snowman’s life, an enigmatic survivor of childhood sexual abuse called Oryx, Atwood conjures a grim, all-too-plausible future in order to consider the possibly devastating consequences of our present ill-advised biotech pursuits. Rigorous in its chilling insights and riveting in its fast-paced “what if” dramatization, Atwood’s superb novel is as brilliantly provocative as it is profoundly engaging. — Donna Seaman
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