Oryx And Crake

The setup

Oryx and Crake is about Jimmy, a man of indeterminate age living in--and to some extent complicit in the instigation of--the wreckage of civilization as we know it. Jimmy is barely surviving because he lacks civilization's high-tech means of compensating for the 21st century's impact on the environment, which apparently include wholesale climate change, destruction of a lot of the ozone layer, and copious numbers of antibiotic-resistant microbes. He sleeps in a tree to avoid genetically engineered predators that roam unchecked, and he must periodically endanger himself by wandering afar to scavenge through smashed dwellings for food, suncream and alcohol. His struggle to survive and his weird dependency-cum-overlordship over a nearby group of mysterious not-quite-humans (that are not all that mysterious, really) form one narrative strand while a parallel strand gives Jimmy's memories of his early life and unwitting involvement in the build-up to the apocalypse.

Jimmy's survivalist lifestyle is nicely described and the segues into memory, provoked by his experiences and moods, are well told. The pace only flags a handful of times. However, the unfolding mysteries of the plot in Jimmy's post-apocalypse existence are usually pretty obvious and I could sometimes feel the lurches as the author moved the story around to point it the right way. It's clear that events must play out to Atwood's schedule and, as a result, there are a few places where the author is playing for a gasp but just got a yawn from me.

Three characters and an apocalypse

Jimmy was raised as part of a privileged elite wholly separated from the rest of humanity, living in secure compounds with their own schools, travelling between compounds on bullet trains that never stop in the "pleeblands". The ivory towers of academia and the sealed labs of the corporate scientist are constructed in this novel as real, physical, permanent barriers between the amoral geniuses, who are ready and equipped to manipulate the stuff of life if their corporate overlords and shareholders demand it, and the unseen real people who live in the chaos of the unplanned society. Crucially and unrealistically, there is nobody in-between, no Outer Party between the top tier of society and the proles. Jimmy is an underachiever in the elite world, eking out an ethically compromised living writing advertising copy for lifestyle-improvement therapies of dubious efficacy. His blurbs are the most sharp-edged satire in this book, unfortunately.

Jimmy's childhood friend is the eponymous Crake, Atwood's Victor Frankenstein figure. Crake is a genetic engineer who, while occasionally sympathetic to Jimmy, is otherwise depicted as monstrously clever, casually callous, manipulative in personal relationships, and (tellingly, tritely, predictably) reluctant even to touch other people. Crake is, though not evil, a rather cartoonish epitome of the amoral genius, an intellect without a heart. Some of his opinions or philosophical positions are deliberately crafted to make the reader feel queasy or, if not, to feel guilty that they themselves might be amoral dangers to humanity.

The third character in the book's triumvirate (or trinity) is Oryx, who simply doesn't belong in the book. She provides the love interest and thereby a certain amount of anxiety to Jimmy and Crake's relationship, performs a token but replaceable role in bringing about the apocalypse, and otherwise seems to be present merely to show that a lousy upbringing (like Jimmy's, like Crake's) doesn't necessarily make a person into a baddie (like Crake) or a patsy (like Jimmy). Oryx, though occasionally deceptive, is mostly just a bit too nice, a bit too sexy, a bit too equinanimous to be real. On the other hand, Crake is always just a brain on a stick. Jimmy is the only real character.

Ho-hum science and fair-to-middling science fiction

All the reviews I read mentioned--and sometimes rhapsodized breathlessly about--the genetically engineered animals and plants that have, since the destruction of modern civilization, escaped into the wider world. There are rakunks, a non-smelly "splice" of racoons and skunks, wolvogs, innocuous-looking dogs that have the untameable predatory nature of wolves, and more. These disappointed me actually, because they were mostly used to add spice or drama when the pace flags or, at least once, to heave the plot over a particular hump. They are also another attempt at inducing reader unease, especially the (blackly humorous) GE chicken designed for the fast-food industry.

More importantly, the genetically engineered animals were annoying near-misses--Atwood doesn't quite Get It about genetically engineered animals. Why, for example, would pigs engineered to produce human neural tissue be notably cleverer than other pigs? It's the system i.e. the human brain that is clever, not the components; a Volkswagen Beetle doesn't fly just because you fit it with a fuel gauge from a Spitfire cockpit. And, accepting for a moment the theory that the cat family purrs to create healing vibrations (published anywhere peer-reviewed yet?), why would early attempts by Crake to engineer humans with this trait result in so obviously catlike a side-effect as whiskers?

This is not an avowedly anti-science book though; it is an attempt to portray commercial, profit-focussed, dehumanized science as A Bad Thing. Atwood has a gently old-fashioned view of science and morality, quite Openheimeresque (and Crake-ian, I suppose):

Please don't make the mistake of thinking that Oryx and Crake is anti-science. Science is a way of knowing, and a tool. Like all ways of knowing and tools, it can be turned to bad uses. And it can be bought and sold, and it often is. But it is not in itself bad. Like electricity, it's neutral.

(from the author interview on www.oryxandcrake.com)

(See my discussion of the tool-like nature of Science elsewhere hereabouts.)

However, any balance or context for this sentiment gets lost. Science looks just plain dangerous in Atwood's depiction because there are no examples of science that has not been bought or sold. There are no scientists who are not corporate employees (except Jimmy's mother, who is a one-dimensional character absented early). We are even shown one group of rebellious scientists who in one scene are vandalous genetic engineers playing pranks (releasing microbes that dissolve tarmac, for example) and are next encountered having, almost to a man (being almost all men), taken the shilling and signed up with Crake for the corporate condo, the well-equipped lab, the projects chosen by marketers and madmen. What price scientific independence? For Atwood, pace the quote above, it doesn't exist except among the anti-globalization protest groups which Jimmy's mother joins. Oryx and Crake is unbalanced and does not accord with the author's sentiments as expressed in the quote above.

Good marketing and not science fiction at all, honest

Who cares about this though? Atwood can always claim that this is a fable or parable rather than a technical treatise, despite the oh-so-realistic style and the ecodoom-laden statements with which the promotional interviews were saturated. Instead, Atwood has created a meta-fiction about this book: while it is inarguably science fiction, she has made several statements to the effect that it is not. For example:

Like The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake is a speculative fiction, not a science fiction proper. It contains no intergalactic space travel, no teleportation, no Martians. As with The Handmaid's Tale, it invents nothing we haven't already invented or started to invent. Every novel begins with a what if, and then sets forth its axioms. The what if of Oryx and Crake is simply, What if we continue down the road we're already on? How slippery is the slope? What are our saving graces? Who's got the will to stop us?

(from www.oryxandcrake.com)

Yeah, right. If the sine qua non of "science fiction proper" really were "intergalactic space travel" then Oryx and Crake would not belong in some other, more artistically valid section of the bookshop; it would just be failed science fiction. But it is science fiction, like so very many other examples of rocketless and robot-free science fiction. Does she really think there are no science fiction tropes or cliches here? Or does she hope we just don't notice them? To me it looks awfully like the brand of dystopia that contains a Last Human (as in Childhood's End, I Am Legend, Kamandi, The Last Boy On Earth, Red Dwarf) struggling to survive in a Post-Apocalyptic Wilderness (as per The Postman, Mad Max Beyond The Thunderdome, Waterworld, etc.) brought about by The Hubris Of Science (exemplified by Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, and The Fly) and who is accidentally Worshipped Or Deified By A Nearby Tribe Of Primitives (cf. Dune, The Matrix) while beset by Memories Of The Golden Age (as per a lot of Arthur C.Clarke and even the back story for Battlestar Galactica). Sorry, Ms Atwood, but your setting, your themes and your characters have a little bit more in common with Planet Of The Apes than you would like to admit.

Am I nitpicking? Is there an sf-like surface under which beats a deeply ironic and satiric literary heart that renders the book something of greater worth than mere sf? Well…er, nope. There's plenty of sf with as much insight into the human condition, as much reverberation with human universals, as much narrative power, as much relevancy. There's lots with more generous dosings of each too. But not all sf is as cannily marketed, is shelved and reviewed with the high-brow stuff rather than the garish juvenilia of the sf section. In this, Atwood has been as successful as Jasper Fforde and Salman Rushdie, both of whom have also written books which reviewers in grown-up newspapers have enjoyed so much they have been forced to conclude not the obvious (that there is some good stuff among the fantasy/sf) but that there has been a category error. A warning to Ms Atwood: the effect is short-lived--of these three authors, only Rushdie continues to get his fantasies invariably shelved with the literary fiction.

This is more than criticism of the marketing strategy. Atwood's statements about what she is writing undermine at least part of her message in the book. The elite to which Jimmy and Crake belong is divorced from the concerns of the plebeian working class and this is A Bad Thing, a precondition for the ravaging of the environment and a symptom of a very bad case of Ivory Tower syndrome. Atwood is arguing that this inevitably leads to the apocalypse, which we real people all agree is Bad but which is a sort of justifiable genocide to its instigator. Meanwhile, Oryx And Crake the book shuns the company of the scruffy peddlers of teleportation and Martians and all stuff that people buy in droves, preferring to hang out with the inward- and backward-facing, soft-palmed, flabby-buttocked literary set. The desire to lift her book from where it rightly belongs and up to the stratospheric shelves of the literary works seems to me hypocritical when the book itself seeks to show that separation from the mainstream, the popular, the best-selling, the proletarian is exactly the point at which the rot first sets in.

Oryx And Crake elsewhere

• Wikipedia on Oryx and Crake
• Guardian review (in the General Fiction section)
• Profile of author and book at Nature