Reading Circle
I just finished Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. It’s a futuristic novel wherein the professional classes live in corporate-sponsored enclaves, islands of gated, guarded isolation from rival corporations (biotech companies are the focus of the novel) and from the gaggle of unclean humanity that occupies “pleebland”. Gene-splicing has advanced to the point where new, purpose-specific species are being uncorked seemingly without much federal oversight - indeed, the enclaves seem to be self-governing, although reference is made occasionally to country and/or geopolitical entities that we are familiar with.
The story is narrated by neither Oryx nor Crake, but by one Snowman, with whom the book opens in some post-calamitous era as a dissolute, naked and vermin-plagued beach bum who sleeps in a tree to avoid the roving packs of wolvogs. He appears to be attended by a group of human-like creatures who dote on him to the extent of bringing him a fish to eat each day (he seems to be terrified of the ocean), but it’s unclear whether he’s their guest or prisoner. He refers to them as “the children of Crake”, and in serial flashbacks he introduces us to Crake as his brilliant, sort of nerdy childhood friend, and their progress through schools and professional life, then brings us forward through the events that have landed him thus on the farthest frontier of a continent and of humanity.
Atwood calls the novel “speculative fiction” rather than “science fiction”. By that, she means that she’s extrapolating events using technology and social structures we currently have, rather than inventing things like transporters and phasers out of the whole cloth. It’s a cautionary tale, I guess, about what happens when man doesn’t have the will and courage to regulate and set ethical limits on burgeoning technologies. The world she envisions is, in a way, the perfection of the corporation-as-government that seems to be evolving in the 21st century.
I don’t think this book has the richness of prose and biting wit that some of her other work has. And, though she spends a lot of effort on the personal relationships in the novel, I don’t feel that she achieves a satisfying clarity regarding either their stated depth of feeling or their motives. I’ll have to read some reviews, and do some more thinking.
