Oryx and Crake

This post first published March 19, 2013.

Author: Margaret Atwood
First Published: May 2003
Publisher: Vintage Canada
Series: MaddAdam #1
416 pages (mass market paperback)
 
Simply amazing!

Two years ago, I read The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood and thought it was a great book, even though the ending half threw me off a bit. Later, I realized the ending half of The Year of the Flood was actually the point of the story that picked up from the ending of another book, Oryx & Crake. That’s when I realized that I actually read the second book in a series!  No wonder I was a bit lost near the end. Anyway, I did like The Year of the Flood quite a bit regardless and told myself I’ll read Oryx & Crake ASAP so that everything makes sense. ASAP apparently means two years later to me, haha.

So yes, here I am, having finally finished the first book of this wonderful series. Oryx & Crake is told by Jimmy, or Snowman, as he likes to be called in the post-apocalyptic world. After a disastrous biological virus of some sort wipes out humanity, Snowman believes he is the last human alive. Everyday he struggles to survive in a world where the animals have been genetically modified to either be more docile than they usually are, or more vicious. He has considered just killing himself off and being done with everything, but he continues to live because he promised his close friends, Crake and Oryx, that he will watch over the Crakers.

The Crakers are genetically modified “humans” that are vastly different from Snowman. They were created by his genius friend Crake, back when the world was still whole. The story alternates between the present, and flashbacks of the past, when Snowman was Jimmy. Jimmy and Crake were best of friends, but Crake was always the more genius of the two. Even when they separated and went to different schools, they remained in touch. One day, Crake invites Jimmy to work at his company, and it is there that Jimmy begins to fully comprehend the genetic projects Crake has been up to. He is assisted by Oryx, a girl that Jimmy and Crake have actually seen in kiddie porn. Both boys fall in love with Oryx.

Like with The Year of the Flood, this is a book with a powerful vision of the future, one that is depressingly bleak. I really love this book, and enjoyed it even more than I did with The Year of the Flood. Unlike its sequel, Oryx & Crake wasn’t just all about the apocalyptic present; there was also the time when the world was seemingly perfect. To them, it was a utopic point of civilization; to the reader, it appears utterly dystopic. The world is ruled by corporations and companies, which really, if you keep up with the news, appears to be the eerily similar path we are heading down. People want to be healthier, fitter, smarter, more beautiful, for as little world as possible, and the corporations in this novel fully take advantage of that. It might sound crazy, but I love books like this that speculate on the future, no matter how awful it may be. I love picking out what is plausible and what isn’t. A lot of things in this book sound like it could possibly happen in the far future.

I liked this novel because there is almost a philosophical component to it, as well. For example, the Crakers bring up an interesting idea. Crake takes the idea of humans becoming better extreme when he creates the Crakers — why not just completely reinvent the human species? Crake gets rid of a lot of what he calls unnecessary human behaviours and creates a “human” that I would argue is not a human anymore, even if they physically resemble one. This book is also full of ideas for conspiracy theories — some people may already believe them! As an example, in the book, Crake says that humans have already pretty much invented the cure for everything, but they keep coming up with new viruses in order to sell more medicine. It is creepily possible … Incidentally, this is what leads to the entire human population dying, when a super virus goes haywire.

And, of course, the writing is fabulous. It was actually quite easy to read and I was hooked onto the story not too many chapters in. I had a hard time putting it down. I loved the characters, they were so memorable. I haven’t fully figured out what was going on between the three characters, specifically Crake and Oryx. They are both such mysterious characters. Crake, especially. You can never fully figure out what’s going on in Crake’s head, which I think is the point. When it comes to Crake, there are so many ways to speculate about why he is behaving the way he is.

I definitely recommend this book to everyone!

My Rating: 5/5

The Year Of The Flood

This post first published May 19, 2011.

Author: Margaret Atwood
Published: 2008
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Series: MaddAdam #2
431 pages (hardcover)
 
After I finished reading this book, I was informed that it is a part of Atwood’s Oryx and Crake world. Something of a side-quel. And I was also informed that it really would be better if I had read Oryx and Crake first before The Year of the Flood. So now I feel kind of sad that I possibly cheated myself out of a better reading experience by reading this one first. I had no idea that this book was part of a series, since I think it did very well as a stand alone novel. Well, you can bet that I am definitely going to seek out Oryx and Crake now …

Anyway, from what I know, the events in The Year of the Flood kind of happen alongside Oryx and Crake, so it is not a sequel per se, but rather a different perspective of the story. In The Year of the Flood, the story has two main female narrators, Toby and Ren, and it is set in the far future. They both join the environmental religious group, God’s Gardeners, led by a man called Adam One. Toby is not a true believer of the faith, but was offered safety in their group from her boss/rapist, so she stays with the God’s Gardeners as a hard worker, and even rises in their ranks. Ren, who is only a kid really, is originally from a Compound (rich, elite) and she joins the God’s Gardeners because her mother Lucerne is infatuated with one of the Gardeners, Zeb. She leaves her husband and drags her daughter along behind her into the Gardeners’ circle.

The first half of the book mainly speaks of the events that happened pre-Flood: how the two joined the Gardeners, how they adapted (or coped) with the Gardeners’ way of living, how they got along with the group. The Gardeners are pacifists, anti-meat, and believe that nothing is truly garbage; everything can be reused. Because they take these beliefs to the extreme, Toby and Ren are kind of bewildered by it all at first. All the while, Adam One is preaching about the Waterless Flood that will cleanse the world of most humans so that a new Eden may grow. The latter half of the book are events that occur post-Flood, which consisted of how the survivors survived; their search for other survivors, their personal struggles. All the while I was reading the book, I couldn’t help but think that the world Atwood created was just so cruel and wicked that perhaps destroying it via a Waterless Flood was the only way to cleanse it.

I enjoyed this novel, especially the first three-fourths of it. Like I said, I never read Oryx and Crake, so for me, there was a bit of wonder in reading about this dystopic world, and curiosity to drive me along. The corporations, the technology and gene melding, and the desire to be more organic and natural are all things we are familiar with in our to world, but they are twisted to the extreme in this book. The book horrified me at times (in an oh-my-god kind of way), especially SecretBurgers, the restaurant/fast-food establishment that serves mystery meat burgers. And by mystery meat, I mean it could be anything; the characters have hinted it could be anything from an alley cat to mice to perhaps even people.

I really liked the characters, they were wonderfully realistic. It’s funny how even when the world is very different, and is possibly coming to an end, human beings still act like human beings. There are those who are greedy and selfish. Children still act like children. And there will still be love and friendship … which sounds kind of hopeful, yet somehow the book still paints a rather depressing picture of these emotions. This is a grim, grim book.

The ending of the book, perhaps the last sixty pages or so, were not as good in my opinion — just that I found it a bit sluggish, and I was no longer sure what direction the book was heading in at that point. From what I read online, apparently the ending is when The Year of the Flood really starts to tie in with Oryx and Crake — so perhaps since I never read O&C, that is why I wasn’t so interested in the ending. Still, I think this is a really good book, especially for lovers of dystopian fiction. It may be a bleak story, and it doesn’t exactly end off on a happy note (more of a cliffhanger, or a question mark, haha), but certainly worth reading.

My Rating: 4/5

The Handmaid's Tale

This post first published May 17, 2011.

Author: Margaret Atwood
Published: 1985
Publisher: Thorndike Press
358 pages (paperback)
 
I’ve heard some things about this book before, mostly from friends who have had to study it in school. Myself, I’ve only read a few poems by the author. I’ve never actually read any of her novels, so this is my first Atwood book. Anyway, I was really looking for Year of the Flood at the library, but when I saw this book, I decided to take it out as well; as far as I know, it’s one of Atwood’s most famous works.

The story does not reveal itself in a straight forward manner; rather, it reveals bits and pieces of the narrator’s life at a time, and not always in order, so that you are required to piece together what the world is like yourself. As a result, when you first begin to read the story, it may seem confusing and a bit disjointed, but gradually you come to understand that this all takes place sometime in the future, where the USA has been taken over by “Gilneans” — from what I understand, they are some sort of extreme Christianity group.

In this world, the birth rate in the USA has dropped to astonishingly low rates, and more often than not, babies are born deformed or mutated in some way. Our main character Offred (whose real name is not revealed) is a Handmaid, a woman who is established to be fertile and assigned to a Commander and his Wife to bear children for them. Every month, Offred, the Commander and the Commander’s Wife perform the Ceremony — Offred lies on top of the Wife while the Commander performs intercourse with Offred. If Offred becomes pregnant and gives birth to a Keeper baby, then the baby becomes the Commander’s and his Wife, and Offred will be assigned to a new family to have children for them. This new world is supposed to make women safer and protected, from the violence and the rapes and other things that happen to women in the 20th century, but instead, Offred has no freedom and has become nothing but an empty person whose only purpose is to breed. She frequently has flashbacks to ‘the time before’, with her husband and her daughter, and wonder what has become of them.

This was a very interesting book. What fueled me to keep reading is that I kept asking ‘Why?’ questions. Every new thing that Offred reveals about the world she is now in had me intrigued. This book really had me thinking, it is so thought provoking. It had me thinking about things like how the women were being treated as in this book — in the book, it says that the new world is very pro-woman compared to ‘the time before’, but of course, at the same time, it seems so very archaic, as the women are being treated as property, or in the case of the Handmaids, less than human. They are only here for breeding purposes.

The book also makes one think about sexuality; sex is strictly forbidden unless authorized between the right people (for example, a Handmaid and her Commander), and even then, it is considered ‘business’, because it’s only for the purpose of breeding. Neither the Handmaid nor the Commander really take pleasure in doing it. Sex as a recreational activity has been drilled into everyone’s mind as a sin. Yet at the same time, Offred finds out that the ruling elite have prostitution houses set up in secret. Kind of makes you think about human nature, not just sex, but how people can be so very hypocritical as well.

There’s many, many other themes and topics to think about in this book, including religion, feminism, knowledge … What I found interesting, and a little scary, is the message in the book that people will go along with just about anything as long as there is a little compensation for it, even if the compensation is not very much. Surely no woman likes this new world where females are treated as second rate citizens, or like they are not human at all, but as long as you give a few select women some small measure of power (such as the Wives, or the Aunts), they will simply let it all happen and not fight back. The women with the most power (which is not a lot) will keep the other women in line.

I really liked this book, it was truly stimulating to read it. After finishing the last page, you can’t help but relate our own present world to the world inside the book. I highly recommend reading this if you are looking for a piece of good literature; very thought provoking!

My Rating: 5/5