Oryx and Crake (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

Margaret Atwood paints a disturbing picture of a storm-racked Earth where corporate greed and arrogant science have virtually destroyed the planet. Near a seashore newly formed by melting icecaps, a vermin-infested creature who calls himself Snowman wraps himself in a filthy sheet and huddles in a tree, terrorized by ferocious wolvogs and crafty pigoons. Snowman is a ragged mythmaker for the Children of Crake, bioengineered innocents in a perverse Eden, in exchange for their weekly tribute of fish. They revere him because he alone knew their brilliant creator Crake, once his best friend, with whom he still pretends to communicate by means of a broken wristwatch.

In flashbacks, where an adolescent Snowman is still known as Jimmy, his parents belong to the scientific elite who work in heavily guarded corporate Compounds far from the grimy cities (pleeblands). His father is an architect of the Pigoon Project, designed to grow multiple human organs in large pig hosts, but his deeply troubled mother escapes the Compound to become an eco-terrorist. Crake’s parents both die mysteriously.

The two boys, who favor violent computer games like Blood and Roses and Kwiktime Osama, accidentally discover the child Oryx on a pornographic Web site, where Jimmy is transfixed by her accusing gaze. She will enter their lives again as a beautiful young woman to become their mutual lover and teacher of the Children, but it is Crake’s misguided vision of the future that will result in the final cataclysm.

Too much of this dystopian world is plausible, even though it is mercifully leavened with Atwood’s acerbic humor (the Children’s hilarious mating ritual, the inedible ChickieNobs). Oryx and Crake will guarantee the reader more than one thoughtful, uneasy night.

Review Sources

America 189, no. 4 (August 18, 2003): 24-25.

Booklist 99, no. 14 (March 15, 2003): 1252.

The Economist 367, no. 8322 (May 3, 2003): 76.

Kirkus Reviews 71, no. 6 (March 15, 2003): 408.

Library Journal 128, no. 8 (May 1, 2003): 152.

Maclean’s 116, no. 17 (April 28, 2003): 44-49.

The New Republic 229, no. 12 (September 22, 2003): 31-36.

The New York Times, May 13, 2003, p. E9.

The New York Times Book Review, May 18, 2003, p. 12.

The New Yorker 79 (May 19, 2003): 88.

Publishers Weekly 250, no. 14 (April 7, 2003): 44.

Time 161, no. 20 (May 19, 2003): 72.