If You Enjoy Mutated Pigs, This One's for You


In Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood imagines a world where science and big business run the world, and have turned it into a dystopian nightmare.

Navigating this new world, and showing us how it got here, is Jimmy. He grew up in a world already crumbling, weighed down by a depressed mother and an addiction to Internet porn. He was ready for the world to fall apart by the time the genetic mutations took over.

Atwood makes Jimmy the book’s centerpiece, relegating the eponymous Oryx and Crake to surface sketches. We see the three interact, and we learn how each played in each others’ lives, but Jimmy is the one who gets the most back story, the most complex write-up. Oryx, on the other hand, comes across as sexy and usable; Crake feels demented and destined to destroy the world with his scientific genius/madness. Neither ever moves past caricature.

The joy of Oryx and Crake is in the tension. From the beginning, the world seems decayed, and an ominous tone sticks to the end. It is bad, but it can get worse, just wait for it. Atwood keeps the story moving along with this depressing, sinister world, approaching its expiration. Although Atwood’s writing can feel a little like a hit to the face with a blunt object, it works in this context.

Oryx and Crake didn’t have much to offer to the development of the end-of-the-world genre in terms of ideas, but it was a lot of fun to read another of Atwood’s takes on how we could all go down. 

Thanks to Ross Swofford for recommending Oryx and Crake.


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