Book #7

Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood

I decided to go with something more serious and literary and stuff, so I read Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood. I love Atwood's writing, what little of it I've seen -- and essay or two in school textbooks and The Handmaid's Tale, one of my favorite books-that-disturbed-me. This one I picked up because it's science fiction, which is cool, and because I absolutely love the title. Both are the names of extinct animals, and are the adopted names of two of the characters (the third goes by both Snowman, as in Abominable, and Thickney, another extinct animal that fits in beautifully: oryx and crake and thickney, crake and thickney, oryx and thickney. Good stuff.).

In the end, I liked this one and I was disturbed by it, though not as disturbed as by The Handmaid's Tale, nor did I like it as much. Atwood has a great talent for speculation; she finds the real flaws in our society and dreams up the worst possible exaggeration of them. You take the sexism and misogyny that underpin so much of our culture, and you make it impossibly evil and vile, and you get the Handmaids; you take our movement towards consumerism and technology as solutions to all of our problems, and you get Oryx and Crake. The big problem I had with this book was the ending. It's a post-apocalyptic scenario, with the human race wiped out completely but for, apparently, Snowman; as the book goes on you realize that he is surrounded by genetic experiments, such as pigoons and rakunks and wolvogs (pig-baboons, racoon-skunks, wolf-dogs) and that his life is utterly pointless and miserable. But what you want to know, of course, is how things got to be like that, how the apocalypse happened; you also want to know why Snowman is so worthless and despondent, but that's secondary. Much of the book is flashbacks that explain the answers to both questions, and the buildup in both issues is really interesting: Snowman, who used to be called Jimmy, had a truly crappy childhood, and his adulthood was not much better. It turns out that as many problems as he has in the post-apocalypse world, he had just as many before the world collapsed, and basically the same ones: he is obsolete and unwanted, and he has no idea how to deal with it. As for the society, it was what made the book disturbing, because it seems to be the way we're heading: toward walled compounds run by corporations, which school, house, and employ the best and brightest, while the lesser people live in squalor and deprivation in the "pleeblands," where cities are overrun and much of the world is dealing with starvation and societal breakdown caused mainly by overpopulation, global warming and climate change. Not fun to read about, though it did make me want to recycle more -- and that's not meant to sound as pathetic as it probably does. We are not at this point yet as a society, and I plan to do everything I can to prevent it.

Anyway, while the flashback stuff was great, the climax happened too quickly and the stuff after the climax -- the falling action according to the plot diagram I have my students do sometimes -- was crappy and too short. Nothing actually gets resolved, and the book ends in Limbo. That was annoying, because too much has changed for me to simply accept the story as is; when the story takes place in our society I can predict what the characters will do with a cliffhanger, which is generally "Make the same mistakes they did before" or, in the less bitter angst-y books, "Learn from their mistakes and be happier overall." But when the entire world has changed over the course of the book -- and though Snowman hasn't really changed, the world certainly has -- I can't simply figure out what comes next, and so the cliffhanger ending becomes simply annoying instead of both annoying and intriguing.

I liked the book, I'm glad I read it. I won't read it again.