Ahead of the publication of MaddAddam, the third book in Margaret Atwood's dystopian trilogy, let's revisit the first novel, Oryx and Crake. Come back in a few days for The Year of the Flood!
Oryx and Crake is a dystopian book in the grand old tradition of dystopias like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Yevgeny Zamyatin's We. The novel plunges us into the dystopic future with one main character as our guide and interpreter, Snowman - or Jimmy, as he was once known. The difference in Atwood's vision is that Snowman isn't a product of his eventual dystopia, but a leftover from an earlier dystopic world much closer to our own, who survived its cataclysm.
Snowman's past is the origin story of Jimmy, his childhood - the unhappy mother who left him, the emotionally absent father - and all the events leading up to the end of his world. Most importantly though, it's the story of his friendship with Crake, a character we never come to really know other than through his influence on Jimmy's life. Jimmy is the lonely artist, the charming, empty man-child harbouring a world of hurt who never grows up and never fully engages with others. Crake is the scientist, the detached, odd, cool kid whose path through life appears to be paved with roses, success dogging his steps, but who nevertheless seems as dissatisfied as his best friend.
It's also the story of the grim future of a world of scientists who care only for profit. This industrial intelligentsia lives in compounds, shunning the rest of humanity, who they come to see as nothing more than the guinea pigs and consumers of their products, rather than their fellow man. Paranoia is at fever pitch, held in check just below the surface of these apparently idyllic communities, where no form of sex, vice or violence is unavailable online, even to kids, or in real life either.
Snowman's present is his struggle to preserve the Crakers, a race of genetically modified humans with all the innocence he never knew as a child. These created humans have been spliced with everything they could need to survive, self-healing capabilities, UV-resistant skin, even the ability to exude citrus chemicals to put off bugs. They've also been engineered to be utterly different from their forebears, most drastically by removing their sexual impulses in favour of a more mammalian approach to procreation that eliminates jealousies. This change also helps to eliminate violence among the Crakers, supposedly since all the jealousies and angers of unrequited loves and passions are omitted.
The central trio is eventually completed by Oryx, a fantasy woman who weaves in and out of Jimmy's life. She is even more of a cipher than Crake, a woman whose history, as related by Snowman, may not even be real. He believes the first few times he saw her were online, separated by years, but he himself at one point admits that he sometimes suspects her story was written by him and the "real" Oryx (if there is such a thing) merely goes along with it. By being a hodgepodge of many of Jimmy's experiences of the second tier of humanity, which he knows mostly from watching various channels online, Oryx is an amalgamation of a lot of his concerns about what's being lost from the world by the wholehearted pursuit of science. That idea of Oryx as a fantasy is strengthened by her short time actually present in Snowman's story, his constant conjuring of her shade to alleviate his loneliness and the obsessiveness with which her previous appearances in his life onscreen retain just as much of a hold over him as the time he actually spent with her.
As an exploration of the dangers of the military-industrial complex coupled with amoral science, Oryx and Crake doesn't have anything too new to say. As with all dystopias, the way to stave off the future is to retain individuality, emotions, love and morality. There's even a splash of maybe God isn't such a bad thing after all and a hint of pastoralism - just like at the end of Battlestar Galactica (SPOILER obviously) we should all give up on this technology stuff and go back to living off the land - providing we haven't totally destroyed the Earth's resources, of course.
The novel does have new things to say about the people living in these dystopic futures though. About how the apathetic desire to take the easy road through life leads as often to disaster as the headlong race towards evil, about the ability of ordinary mortals to rise up to some occasions and fall woefully short of others. It's also a closer dystopia to our own world, this isn't hundreds or thousands of years into the future, this is a mere hop, skip and a jump down the road, making Snowman's description of the descent all the more compelling.
Atwood never takes her foot of the gas, from the moment the novel kicks off, the questions are all-consuming and their tantalisingly revealed answers are thrilling, shocking and compelling. The prose is straightforward, assisting the galloping pace, explaining all that needs to be said without over-elaboration and peppered with occasional gems of invention, particularly in the marketing speak of company and product names - ReJoovEsence, BlyssPlus, OrganInc. If you're a victim of the ease of ebooks, you'll finish Oryx and Crake and immediately download The Year of the Flood, while putting in a pre-order for MaddAddam. Because although the book resolves its central issues nicely, there are still questions to be answered and you get the sense that no amount of time in this fantastically penned world will be long enough.
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