Oryx and Crake
2002
- literary fiction
- friendship
- fantasy
- genetic engineering
- fiction
- science fiction
- triangles (interpersonal relations)
- open syllabus project
- long now manual for civilization
- romance
The story
Oryx and Crake is at once an unforgettable love story and a compelling vision of the future. Snowman, known as Jimmy before mankind was overwhelmed by a plague, is struggling to survive in a world where he may be the last human, and mourning the loss of his best friend, Crake, and the beautiful and elusive Oryx whom they both loved. In search of answers, Snowman embarks on a journey–with the help of the green-eyed Children of Crake–through the lush wilderness that was so recently a great city, until powerful corporations took mankind on an uncontrolled genetic engineering ride. Margaret Atwood projects us into a near future that is both all too familiar and beyond our imagining.
What it’s like
Bleached, overgrown ruins under a hard sun: the prose moves between two registers, a dry, ironic voice recalling a childhood compound of glass towers and manicured lawns, and a present-tense wander through scrub, rot and wildlife where the city used to be. Its sensory world is precise and unsparing, with the smell of decay, the wind through broken concrete, and strange new creatures rendered in clinical detail. The mood is elegiac and unsettled, a slow-burning dread with flickers of tenderness, closer to a sun-bleached melancholy than to horror. Pacing alternates between languid memory and tense stretches of scavenging and watchfulness, and the emotional core is a grieving, guilt-ridden man turning over old friendships and a lost love. Violence is present but not lingered on: there are sudden deaths, the aftermath of a plague, and some sexual content that is frank without being explicit. It suits a slow, reflective read on a quiet evening, for readers who enjoy speculative fiction that leans literary, moral unease, and the ache of a world ending in plain sight.
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