Margaret Atwood's classic novel, THE HANDMAID'S TALE, is about the future. Now, in ORYX AND CRAKE, the future has changed. It's much worse. And we're well on the road to it now. The narrator of Margaret Atwood's riveting new novel is Snowman, self-named though not self-created. As the story begins, he's sleeping in a tree, wearing a dirty old bedsheet, mourning the loss of his beautiful and beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. Earlier, Snowman's life was one of comparative privilege. How did everything fall apart so quickly? Was he himself in any way responsible? Why is he now left alone with his bizarre memories - except for the more-than-perfect, green-eyed Children of Crake, who think of him as a kind of monster? He explores the answers to these questions in the double journey he takes - into his own past, and back to Crake's high-tech bubble dome, where the Paradice Project unfolded and the world came to grief.
With breathtaking command of her shocking material and with her customary sharp wit and dark humour, Atwood projects us into a less-than-brave new world, an outlandish yet wholly believable space populated by a cast of characters who will continue to inhabit your dreams long after the last chapter. This is Margaret Atwood at the absolute peak of her powers.
Margaret Atwood imagines a world that has been reduced to a disease-ravaged wasteland. Its (apparent) only inhabitants are a group of genetically-modified superhumans who have the intellectual capacity of children, terrifying animal hybrids, and a human named Snowman, who is apparently the only person who remembers the world as it was. The narrative alternates between the past and present (a trademark of Atwood's writing), and we get to see the segregated, capitalist world that existed before total collapse. There are a lot of interesting things to pick out here: the aggressive advertising of self-improvement products, the obsession with youth, the fact that corporations pretty much own everything. This is a very different dystopia to that of The Handmaid's Tale, one that focuses less on regressive patriarchy and more on how bad capitalism is. Atwood's writing and worldbuiling is always sensational, so no complaints there. And yet this was not really my cup of tea. First of all, there was only one female character in the whole thing, and she's kind of an Orientalist fetish object who exists exclusively as the target of Snowman's sexual obsessions. Like, if a man wrote this book I would probably be really mad. But Margaret Atwood can't just get a pass for being Margaret Atwood! Don't be racist, Peggy! I'm begging you!
