ORYX AND CRAKE (BY) MARGARET ATWOOD

Published 2004, 374 pages
Characters: C
Writing: B+
Plot/Pacing: C
Poignancy: B-

Part dystopian future, part last-man-on-earth parable, Oryx and Crake is yet another book in the stack of literary authors attempting to explore genre themes intelligently, once again making it clear that writing good speculative fiction is a hell of a lot harder than anyone realizes. As with many such attempts, the end result reads like an awkward literary experiment more than a convincing warning of our possible future.

Oryx and Crake is the story of Jimmy, his BFF Crake, and mutual love interest Oryx. They live in a future where the earth has become crowded and miserable, where civilization is in the process of disintegrating.  The biggest companies — grown powerful and rich off of bio-engineered food and various disease vaccines — have become self-sustained cities in which their employees live free from the horrors of the outside world. It's not the most original premise, but it doesn't have to be, since Atwood starts out well, lays it out well, really gets into the scope of it all. Bizarrely, it's the trivial details that end up being her first major setback. Atwood approaches her material with a sort of tongue-and-cheek condescension, and just she can't seem to get enough of it. Despite the lack of humor anywhere else in this book, we're meant to believe that corporations in this world have given themselves phonetic, ironically childish names like AnooYoo and RejoovenEsense, and popular genetically altered foods are marketed as Happicuppa coffee and SoyOBoy burgers. And let's not forget the new animals: wolvogs, pigoons and rakunks. Because obviously, the future is silly and quirky, right?
It's grating the first time, nauseating the 100th time, and by the 1000th time you hear one of those goddam terms you wonder if Atwood is using them so often because she's daring you to try to take her story seriously. It's sad, as this lightweight approach to her own creation undermines the fact that her future world is actually  frighteningly realistic, a pretty dreary vision of where we'll be in 100 years.

Crake, from the very start, has ambitions for sweeping all the trash of the world away, though we're never once given a hint as to why. He's smart, has parental issues, is introverted and yet not really a social outcast. Despite providing a good chunk of the novel's dialogue, I can't say I ever really got a good sense of his character. Oryx, a former child pornstar who stumbles upon the male leads when all three are much older, has a complicated backstory that doesn't accomplish anything either. Instead of actually having a role or function in the novel, she's tucked into a series of hushed, post-coital bedroom dialogues. Oyrx could have been used to escalate the drama, to give Crake an identifiable motivation for his actions, to highlight some undeveloped conflict between the main characters... but no. There's no tension, no interplay between the three, no culmination of the mystery behind her that begins with the very first chapter — in fact, Oryx seems to have been placed in the story simply so it could have a female character. Atwood at times does touch upon something poignant, having Jimmy patronize the girl as he demands to know more about her troubled past and the men he imagines must have used her, but these little touches of character seem like part of another story told by other, deeper characters.

How does Atwood manage to accomplish so little? It's almost staggeringly short-sighted, as if she got so fascinated with her pun-based novelty foods that she was forced to skimp on plot. You see, the entire novel is told in flashback. Well, not the entire novel, but damn near 90% of it. The "present" is only there so we know that the world has ended and that Jimmy is the last person left alive (along with some of Crake's genetic hybrid creatures). There is no plot, technically speaking — a series of flashbacks can only result in  the present, thus removing any possible suspense. From the very beginning the reader knows that Crake and Oryx and everyone else are dead, we just don't know how. That's it. It's a self-creating mystery, and not a very complex one. It's immediately obvious that Crake wipes out humanity with a plague because Atwood foreshadows the hell out of it, and anyway, let's be frank here, it's a post-apocalyptic novel so obviously someone in it is going to wipe out humanity with a plague. Yet, despite spending almost the entire story in the novel's past, Atwood manages to explain almost nothing about what happened and the characters who made that almost-nothing happen.

I've focused on the negative aspects of the novel for the most part, because they truly need to be stated. And I could go on, but the point is made. Atwood is a solid writer, and her prose is mostly very strong, the pacing fluid, the characters interesting despite being hugely underutilized. In fact, Oryx and Crake is a remarkably readable novel considering how clumsily Atwood bungles her plot and the many potential paths she could have taken it down. The novel's main fault is that it simply doesn't go anywhere and refuses to make any kind of impact, and I think that eliminates any chance it has for being memorable. There are allusions to the redemption of man's spirit, the damnation of man, the superiority of nature, the horrors of the unnatural, the unstoppable greed of society, the adaptability of society... and yet none of those themes really stick for more than moment. Still, for a book that spends 374 pages treading water, it could have been a disaster and it wasn't. I'm curious to check out Atwood's other books, to see how she handles more comfortable material.