Oryx and Crake [DECKLE EDGE] (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In Oryx and Crake, a science fiction novel that is more Swift than Heinlein, more cautionary tale than "fictional science" (no flying cars here), Margaret Atwood depicts a near-future world that turns from the merely horrible to the horrific, from a fool's paradise to a bio-wasteland. Snowman (a man once known as Jimmy) sleeps in a tree and just might be the only human left on our devastated planet. He is not entirely alone, however, as he considers himself the shepherd of a group of experimental, human-like creatures called the Children of Crake. As he scavenges and tends to his insect bites, Snowman recalls in flashbacks how the world fell apart.

While the story begins with a rather ponderous set-up of what has become a clichéd landscape of the human endgame, littered with smashed computers and abandoned buildings, it takes on life when Snowman recalls his boyhood meeting with his best friend Crake: "Crake had a thing about him even then.... He generated awe ... in his dark laconic clothing." A dangerous genius, Crake is the book's most intriguing character. Crake and Jimmy live with all the other smart, rich people in the Compounds--gated company towns owned by biotech corporations. (Ordinary folks are kept outside the gates in the chaotic "pleeblands.") Meanwhile, beautiful Oryx, raised as a child prostitute in Southeast Asia, finds her way to the West and meets Crake and Jimmy, setting up an inevitable love triangle. Eventually Crake's experiments in bioengineering cause humanity's shockingly quick demise (with uncanny echoes of SARS, ebola, and mad cow disease), leaving Snowman to try to pick up the pieces. There are a few speed bumps along the way, including some clunky dialogue and heavy-handed symbols such as Snowman's broken watch, but once the bleak narrative gets moving, as Snowman sets out in search of the laboratory that seeded the world's destruction, it clips along at a good pace, with a healthy dose of wry humor. --Mark Frutkin, Amazon.ca

From Publishers Weekly

Atwood has visited the future before, in her dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale. In her latest, the future is even bleaker. The triple whammy of runaway social inequality, genetic technology and catastrophic climate change, has finally culminated in some apocalyptic event. As Jimmy, apparently the last human being on earth, makes his way back to the RejoovenEsencecompound for supplies, the reader is transported backwards toward that cataclysmic event, its full dimensions gradually revealed. Jimmy grew up in a world split between corporate compounds (gated communities metastasized into city-states) and pleeblands (unsafe, populous and polluted urban centers). His best friend was "Crake," the name originally his handle in an interactive Net game, Extinctathon. Even Jimmy's mother-who ran off and joined an ecology guerrilla group when Jimmy was an adolescent-respected Crake, already a budding genius. The two friends first encountered Oryx on the Net; she was the eight-year-old star of a pedophilic film on a site called HottTotts. Oryx's story is a counterpoint to Jimmy and Crake's affluent adolescence. She was sold by her Southeast Asian parents, taken to the city and eventually made into a sex "pixie" in some distant country. Jimmy meets Oryx much later-after college, after Crake gets Jimmy a job with ReJoovenEsence. Crake is designing the Crakers-a new, multicolored placid race of human beings, smelling vaguely of citron. He's procured Oryx to be his personal assistant. She teaches the Crakers how to cope in the world and goes out on secret missions. The mystery on which this riveting, disturbing tale hinges is how Crake and Oryx and civilization vanished, and how Jimmy-who also calls himself "the Snowman," after that other rare, hunted specimen, the Abominable Snowman-survived. Chesterton once wrote of the "thousand romances that lie secreted in The Origin of Species." Atwood has extracted one of the most hair-raising of them, and one of the most brilliant.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 383 pages
• Publisher: Nan A. Talese; First Edition edition (May 6, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385503857
• ISBN-13: 978-0385503853
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (332 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #110,805 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

110 of 129 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the year's best novels for 2003, December 14, 2003

By	Ratmammy "The Ratmammy" (Ratmammy's Town, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

ORYX AND CRAKE by Margaret Atwood

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2003, ORYX AND CRAKE is Margaret Atwood's most apocalyptic story to date. For those of you who have read THE HANDMAID'S TALE, ORYX AND CRAKE is a lot more grim and depressing, in terms of the plight of the human race. It may be a challenge for some to get through this book. Those who are fans of Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction, however, may embrace this novel as I did. It is probably one of the best novels written by Margaret Atwood.

There are two main themes in ORYX AND CRAKE. First, the novel takes place in the distant future, where global warming has changed the earth so much that the coastal cities no longer exist, and New York is now New New York. Going outside in the sun is a death sentence, so the wealthier areas of the world are protected under places known as compounds, although areas known as The Pleebands still exist, where people live and are still exposed to nature in all its glory.

The second major plot line has to do with three central characters. Snowman is the narrator, also known as Jimmy, who at the start of the book is the only known surviving human being on the face of the planet. The book starts off with Snowman sleeping in a tree, barely alive, knowing that he does not have too much longer to live. Food is scarce, the sun is so hot he has blisters all over his body, and the genetically engineered creatures the wolvogs and the pigoons that have escaped are now roaming the grounds.

While he tries to keep alive, Snowman also keeps watch over a group of humanoid creatures called the Crakers, named after his "best" friend Crake, who was somehow responsible over the creation of these people. These Crakers are supposedly the ideal humans. They have no emotional desires, in particular no sex drives, except to pro-create. There is no reason for war, with this new type of human being. They are vegetarians, and do not desire meat. They are very simple people, and Snowman had promised to care for them if anything happened to Crake.

As Snowman goes back in time to reflect on the past, we learn more about Crake, who was an egotistical brilliant young man who had visions of a so-called better world. The third main character is Oryx, a woman whose history takes the reader to a third world Asian country where she was sold into a type of servitude, and eventually becomes a prostitute. She then finds her way to the western world and ends up working with Crake, becoming part of his plan when he creates the Crakers. Their story is revealed in pieces, told while Snowman goes on an adventure to find food and seek out the compound where it had all began. Snowman wants to go back to this place, hoping to find answers and food and supplies, and to remember the reasons why the human race was nearly obliterated. It's the story of these three and their lopsided relationship that leads us to answers of why the world "ended".

The new concepts and horrors that are being introduced in the book may overwhelm the reader. However, the most important theme to focus on is "what really happened"? Why is Snowman the only person left on the planet? What happened to Oryx and Crake? This is what drove me to finish this book. I could not put it down. The reader is left in the dark until the very end, when it is finally revealed how the human race was nearly wiped out. It is a very futuristic and depressing story of how mankind can go wrong in the search of a better world.

I have always had a fascination with books that take on a type of apocalyptic theme. Margaret Atwood's vision of the earth's future is not a pretty sight, but it was her story of Oryx, Crake and Snowman that made the book worthwhile. I am giving this book 5 stars, and it will most likely be in my top 5 for 2003.

32 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A radical departure from Atwood's previous novels, June 3, 2003

By	D. Cloyce Smith (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

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Atwood's latest and strangest novel is truly unlike anything she has previously written, and readers of Atwood's other novels may find themselves flipping to the front, checking to see if her name is really on the title page. Like "The Handmaid's Tale," which was also set in the future, "Oryx and Crake" describes a dystopic tomorrow-land--but there the similarity ends. Featuring an uncharacteristically sparse prose and an abundance of scientific content, Atwood's bitingly satirical and hauntingly apocalyptic novel seems heavily influenced by science fiction novels of the last three decades, even while it recalls such classics as "Frankenstein," "Brave New World" and especially "Robinson Crusoe."

"Oryx and Crake" is technically a single-character novel; "Snowman" (or Jimmy) is the surviving human after a cataclysmic global disaster. He serves as a mentor of sorts to the strange yet harmless "Crakers," who have been so genetically altered that they resemble humans only in their basic appearance. Their blandness is so thorough that neither Snowman nor the reader can tell them apart. Through a series of flashbacks, Snowman describes his closest friends Crake and Oryx and their role in bring the world to its present state; and he mockingly details his attempts at elevating them to the status of gods for the new species. Atwood doesn't really develop these two characters; instead she (through Snowman's eyes) presents only the basic, painful "truth" behind a new Genesis mythology.

The novel, one could argue, depicts a second character: the scientific community. Through extrapolation (one might say exaggeration--but I'm not so optimistic about industrial self-control), Atwood projects into the future the topics of today's headlines: anthrax, genetically modified foods, cloning, gene splicing, weapons of mass destruction, the overuse and abuse of psychiatric drugs, Internet porn, SARS, ecoterrorism, globalization. On a lighter level, she also skewers the moronic corporate brand names flooding the market these days: anyone who thinks her inventions are far-fetched should consider such mind-numbingly lame (and inexplicably popular) trademarks as Verizon, ImClone, MyoZap, Swole, Biocidin, and Rejuven-8.

"Oryx and Crake" may well fall short of some readers' expectations for "a Margaret Atwood novel." But judged as an entry in the genre of science fiction, it's a powerful and visionary masterpiece.

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars The Crakers weren't all they were cracked up to be., June 3, 2003

By A Customer

I have been a fan and avid reader of Ms. Atwood's since the mid-80's, and have read most of her novels. I eagerly waited for Oryx and Crake, and raced through it in less than three days. It had all the hallmarks of an Atwood novel: dystopian future nightmare; silly (but not unthinkable) product names; characters with multiple lives and secrets.

But it was missing the most important hallmarks of an Atwood novel: it just wasn't entertaining or engaging on a par with her previous works.

Perhaps the fact that it was set in a future that is entirely possible given today's environment, or that we're surrounded by SARS and anthrax scares, but I just did not find it frightening or illuminating. The scare that is the backbone of the novel isn't scary enough. The character's secrets weren't that secret. The horrors of pornography weren't that horrible. The ability for one person to create global cataclysmic chaos is a bit far-fetched. The Crakers weren't all they were cracked up to be.

All in all, I was disappointed. Ms. Atwood has made a career of postulating tales that are "out there" enough to disturb you, but not so far out there that they are impossible or pure science fiction. What I found wanting was more of a leap to the range of "out there".

This would be an excellent "introductory" novel to Ms. Atwood's writing, but serious fans shouldn't thrash themselves if they don't rush out to get it. Wait for the paperback (better yet, borrow it from your library).