Oryx and Crake

#414
Title: Oryx and Crake
Author: Margaret Atwood
Publisher: Anchor
Year: 2004
416 pages

Audiobook here, though for $74 you could pay a friend to read it aloud to you. My download was through the vast, evil, yet comparatively inexpensive iTunes empire.


Long ago in my Philosophy of the Arts class, we read and argued a great deal about the Intentionalist Fallacy. This is the claim that the artist's intentions don't matter, that what matters is the meaning conveyed by the art product. I find authors' intentions interesting, but try first to understand the meanings that are present in the text. I usually enjoy this more, because the creators' intentions are often feverishly asserted but not realized in the art. Atwood claims that science fiction is about "talking squids in outer space," and that that's not what she writes. Margaret, you write about GMO humanoids in a post-apocalyptic dystopia. I see how that's not science fiction at all. :rolleyes: I suppose I could also say ":snap: What-EVAH!" For pretty much the rest of us, Oryx and Crake is science fiction, a thematic category in which Atwood does some lovely work. So don't bother finding the insulting authorial exegesis, but instead proceed directly to the book.

Oryx and Crake is poignant, poetic, and emotional, which is no small task with a not-very-sympathetic and schlubby protagonist, grandly catastrophic actions, and a wide-ranging narrative that includes an errant mother, rakunks (raccoon plus skunk), the sexual trafficking of children, biochemical attacks, gated compounds, and the aforementioned genetically modified humanoids. The story follows Snowman, who grew up as a comparatively average guy surrounded by geniuses. While not passive-aggressive, Snowman is passive, or hesitant, or uncertain, or unable to take a stand for his convictions, at many times from his childhood to adulthood. His reminiscence, often painful and self-loathing, supplies the story of how he comes to find himself wrapped in a sheet, in the tropical fringe of a beach with a not-so-human tribe, making up answers to their many irritating questions. Atwood is a wordsmith, and like Ursula Le Guin, writes a deeply satisfying, smart narrative.

Atwood is a master of world-building. Sure, some of what she proposes is far out, but this is, like The Handmaid's Tale, a cautionary fantasy. I remember hostile critiques when The Handmaid's Tale was first published, arguments that Atwood's near-future dystopia was unrealistic and wacked out. The intervening shifts in politics and culture make the idea of a fundamentalist religious government in the U.S. seem not so much an absurd speculation as a matter of degree. (Robert Heinlein, of course, gave us his own version of a military theocracy in his 1940 story "If This Goes On--.") As I check my food labels for GMO notices, read about fluorescent cats, and find that the Internet knows where I live even when I use someone else's computer, I find myself wondering if the Atwood is all that far off.