Oryx and Crake. Sounds like an accountancy firm.
There’s no accountancy here. It’s emphasized repeatedly that the main character’s not a numbers guy, despite growing up surrounded by scientists.
Oh. That sounds more promising. Is he Oryx, or Crake?
He’s neither. He’s Snowman, though in his pre-apocalyptic life he was called Jimmy.
Oooh, an apocalypse. This is definitely getting interesting. Do we get to see the explosions?
I’ve yet to read anything by Maggie Atwood which involves explosions, though I admit there’d be some appeal in seeing a film of The Blind Assassin directed by Michael Bay. This apocalypse was born in a world where multinational corporations house their employees in privileged compounds, and GM has been taken up several notches by breeding whole new species. Pigoons have been crafted to grow human organs and neural tissue, spiders are spliced with goats and chickens are turned into self-growing nuggets.
Let me guess… it doesn’t end well?
How did you guess? By the time the book opens, that world is gone. We meet Snowman living in a tree, his skin constantly burned by the UV of the midday sun, and scavenging to survive amongst the ruins of civilisation. He’s also the caretaker and prophet of the Children of Crake, a new crafted species of intelligent life, human but not.
So Crake made new people to survive the apocalypse?
Sort of. Crake himself was a genius, and Snowman’s childhood friend. We see their relationship, and the old world, in a series of flashbacks as Snowman travels to the Rejoov compound where he and Crake worked when the apocalypse… pocalypsed.
And Oryx?
An old lover of both Crake and Jimmy. Snowman is haunted by her, and by his guilt over what happened to the world.
It was his fault?
Not as such, but he was at ground zero. The book feels, sometimes, like it’s trying to show how he comes to terms with what happened to the world and with his time at Rejoov, but he never really gets anywhere. His physical journey doesn’t really have an emotional one to go with it – even in the flashbacks, as we follow Jimmy from child to adult, he never seems to grow up.
Sounds a bit flat.
It’s the main failing of the book. The writing is gorgeous – it is an Atwood, after all – and the dystopia she presents, both pre and post-apocalypse, is well realised. The little details she throws in with the escaped creatures and future products and commercialism are a delight, even if the overall premise isn’t quite as original as all the critics who never read sci-fi seem to think. But the characters, while interesting enough, don’t have a massive amount of depth. I quite enjoyed reading this, but I didn’t have a hard time putting it down through the first two-thirds or so.
And the final third?
As the flashbacks draw closer to D-Day, it starts to get a lot more compelling. By this point, you know what’s going to happen, you know how Jimmy, Oryx and Crake will finish the day, but watching it play out had me gripped for the last 100 pages.
So… overall verdict?
It’s not her best. The Blind Assassin was an absolute barnstormer. But it’s a smart, well-drawn, horrible future, and I’m still going to find The Year Of The Flood and MaddAddam, the other two books of the trilogy. I’m just not going to do it right away.
0 comments… add one