Oryx and Crake (The MaddAddam Trilogy) - Novel that has boost the enthusiasm

This novel, the first in Margaret Atwood's dystopian trilogy, is a fascinating, dark and thought-provoking ride. Perhaps overshadowing the story itself, Atwood's world forces the reader into tremendous moral reflection. We are made to question the nature of exploitation, the meaning of social consent and whether effort for the greater good can ever be divorced from emotional self-interest. In terms of bigger picture message, if not story, the first book reminds me of Hugh Howey's mesmerizing Wool series.

The story centers around Jimmy, also called Snowman, assumed to be the lone survivor of a plague that destroyed humanity. His companions are Crakers: a society of unworldly humanoid experiments designed to eliminate the perceived flaws of normal homo sapiens. The Crakers see Snowman as a relic and link to the "before" times as well as their source of knowledge about their creator, Crake. Jimmy has given the Crakers an origin story, that while false, is something he feels they can mentally grasp. The enigmatic Oryx is the novel's most interesting character primarily because she is so difficult to understand. She is the love interest to both Jimmy (Snowman) and Crake.



Atwood, an avid environmentalist, creates a believable world where climate change accelerates with cataclysmic consequences; changing the nature of agriculture and livestock production, flooding major cities and changing the weather. To compensate, society evolves into a two-tiered structure where scientists and thought-workers segregate themselves into highly secure compounds while the remainder of humanity fend for themselves in decaying, crime-ridden "plebelands". The scientists, working for global corporations, create increasingly bizarre animal and plant hybrids for food in addition to rejuvenation products that increase lifespan and beauty for those who can afford them.

The novel is, overall, an excellent one and well worth the read. The characters are well-developed and fascinating though almost uniformly difficult to like. Many elements of the story are gut-wrenchingly plausible and Atwood masterfully manages to ruin your sleep at night. One leaves the tale of Oryx and Crake with little hope for the future of humanity. Too many genies, it seems, are already out of the bottle.

It's possible to nitpick some of the story's futuristic elements. For example, published in 2003, it's difficult to see how Atwood couldn't see the coming of smart phones and electronic documents. Jimmy, searching for a job, is somehow snail mailing his paper resume to prospective employers. And another nit, as a former marketer, I found nearly all of the product names things that would have been mercilessly ridiculed at any ad meeting. Atwood seems in love with cheesy rhymes and putting "oo" in everything (Anooyoo, Soy Oh-Boy, pigoons).

Still, world-building is hard, and you have to cut the author some slack. After all, we let Suzanne Collins get away with never explaining how and why the Hunger Games world is like that. Whether or not you will like Oryx and Crake really depends on your feelings about apocalyptic fiction. I tend to rate this type of fiction on whether the author made me think and creeped me out. This novel will definitely do both of those things.




Brilliant book written by one of the most significant writers of our time. I've read this book several times, along with the other books in the MaddAddam trilogy (The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam). These act as prequel and sequel to the story depicted here in Oryx and Crake so once you've read this book you just have to read the others.
Oryx and Crake reads like an alien play set in world of ecological and human devastation where the results of scientific experiments threaten survivors. It is the most abstract book of the trilogy. When I first read it, Margaret Atwood was still working on the second and final parts. I remember not being able to wait until I could follow up on this strange, cruel story. We don't know much about the world in this book, other than it has become hostile and frightening but right from the start we do identify and care for Snowman, the main character and the human condition he portrays. It's one version of our future and I itched to know how we got there. If you like science fiction and can suspend your need to have a full explanation as to why each thing happens, do read this book. The issues Margaret Atwood raises are significant and relevant to our lives today - some you'll find more difficult to accept than others but Atwood's writing is so seductive, she can challenge us and make us think about what is happening in society whilst immersing us into an absorbing fictional world







Brilliant ideas as Atwood is brave enough to observe our free market technological excesses that make fascism look like an old and shy experiment. Children are encouraged to desensitise themselves from violence and sadism through live online pedo porn and snuff (execution) videos.

However as with Angela Carter I have a problem relaxing with the book and loving its voice as the style is a knotted rope of nouns that makes me feel like I am reading German and TV advertising or worse: a German TV advert! It is noun after noun, with phonetic catchiness ("Rejoovenate" etc) which to a European other language native speaker looks like an ugly barrier but also like computer programming code. Sci FI used to be beautifully written and have longer - deeper-meaning bearer- sentences but since the US TV communication mode took over all forms of oral communication in English speaking countries, most sci fi and dystopian futuristic novels are written like a script skeleton, like a bare structure for a literary writer to re write. I am aware that after reading Primo Levi, Aldous Huxley, Arthur Rimbaud and Alain Fournier and also the great Rene Barjavel, contemporary English -language sci FI or fantasy literature looks brutally or economically written when in fact Atwood has as much talent as all these writers, it is just the literary standards of the market that dictate this (to me, dry and short) style.




Our reader-friendly narrator is the jokily self-depreciative Snowman - Jimmy in a former life. Jimmy's remorseful and backward-directed eyes, unstable emotions, and scatological humour guide us through the disquieting genesis of the catastrophe. Sleeping in a tree to avoid predation, he is far from happy to find himself one of a handful of survivors. Devastated by guilt, resentful of what new role might be expected of him in this brave new world of scarcity and danger, he gazes angrily at the drowned skyscrapers of a former great American city in the bay opposite his roost, haunted by what part he himself might have played in the catastrophe and pining for the happiness he has lost.

The Oryx and Crake of the title were his best, and most formative, friends dating back, at least in the case of Crake, to the world of his adolescence. But as the narrative unwinds we discover that this world was already morally bankrupt. Walled-off and guarded compounds accommodated the super-rich, isolating them from the semi-feral "pleeb-lands" beyond. Wealth, and social status, was centred on profit-driven genetic engineering of animals, and even humans, for sundry disreputable purposes including body parts. In Snowman's sceptical, oft-times parodic, memories of his childhood, schooling and dysfunctional family, we witness a world already hurtling down the slippery slope. His mother, herself a scientist working in genetic engineering, abandons him during a conscience-driven breakdown. Little in the way of direct explanation is offered in the narrative so we are obliged to interpret her motivations and actions through her baffled and less than devoted son. We also witness, through the wonderfully scatter-brained and sex-addicted adolescent male ruminations of Jimmy, the inanely stupid potentials of genetic engineering in a world devoid of moral compass. The hugely altered pigoons (transgenic pigs), the threatening wolfogs, and the people-friendly rakunks ( hybrids of raccoons and skunks), typify the brainless experimentation and greedy exploitation.

Atwood employs a formidable arsenal of literary skills to enliven her narrative, including crystal clear language, cutting edge street talk, the spiritual leprosy of internet pornography, arresting neologisms, and, as with Snowman, a relentless, desperately ironic viewpoint. Indeed, with Jimmy/Snowman she may have created one of the noteworthy characters of modern literature.

The rise to self-assertive pragmatism of the delightful and mysterious and quintessentially oriental Oryx from the vilest degradation to pragmatic human being is the second great characterisation. Of the key characters in the book, I have to admit that she is the one I would most like to share a conversation with over a bacon sandwich and glass or three of Cognac.
While dystopia and apocalypse is hardly novel as a theme, this is a disturbing, highly original and yet still highly entertaining foray into that seductive darkness. One senses, and identifies with both the anger and challenging spirit that drives the novel.




Okay, to contrast a few of the opinions already expressed about this book: I don't care if a book is derivative or shocking, I don't mind swearing, I don't mind graphic scenes of sex and/or violence, and I certainly don't mind suspending disbelief for a few hours. I'm not a literary type and essentially, first and foremost, what I'm looking for in fiction is at least one character I can like and an engaging storyline.

I liked the characters of Jimmy and Crake, and I liked (reading about) the future-world that Ms Atwood placed them in. We were off to a good start!

I didn't understand the point of the Crakers, other than the blindingly obvious. I'm fairly sure I missed something there, some symbolism or deeper truth: but what was it? I felt, as some others have mentioned, that the character of Oryx was a bit thin, and defined more through Jimmy's eyes than in its own right.

There was, for me, a definite disconnect between the humourlessness of the plot/setting and the quirky, amusing names handed to all manner of entities throughout the text. For me, this got more annoying towards the final third of the book.

The ending was where I really lost my bearings. It just..ends, and again, I couldn't find any meaning to it.

I don't regret reading the book - it was a fun little dip into Ms Atwood's vision of a future. She researched the scientific material well and I was convinced, she used a well-worn plot - but stamped her mark on it and she created some interesting characters to carry the load of moving the story along. I just can't shake the feeling that either the book isn't that deep - or my brain isn't sufficiently powerful to plumb its depths.

So, overall, an "I liked it" four stars.

I'm off to try and find an analysis of this book - and also to order my copy of Ronald Wright's novel "A Scientific Romance" - which I've seen mentioned a few times in other reviews as a worthy contender/superior.