Oryx and Crake

I'm late to the game reading Margaret Atwood's "Oryx and Crake." It caught my attention when it was banned here in Utah under HB29 for containing "sensitive materials." I guess that's one outcome of a book ban—it draws more attention to the book.

I started a Book Club here in Salt Lake City at one of Utah's most unique and inviting bookstores, The King's English Bookshop. This book was our first selection.

Being part of this book club was a genuinely inspiring experience. It provided a wonderful place to connect with fellow book lovers and engage in stimulating discussion. The diverse interpretations and perspectives shared during our meeting shed new light on the book and challenged my understanding of the novel.

"Oryx and Crake" is set in a post-apocalyptic landscape. The story follows Snowman, possibly the last human survivor, navigating a world populated by genetically engineered beings.

This was my first Atwood novel, but I know her reputation. Her strength lies in weaving complex themes into a compelling narrative. The book explores genetic engineering, corporate power, environmental collapse, and the consequences of unchecked scientific advancement. Her world-building is intricate and believable, drawing fascinating and alarming parallels to our current society. This may be why it was banned: Too shocking, too close to home. (Although there are references to child pornography and quite a few sexual acts are referenced. I don’t believe this is for a young teenager; I do believe it is for a mature high school student. During our Book Club discussion, parents felt that they would have access to everything in this book if they had a smartphone. At least this book isn’t showing what it references, but it does help spark conversations that should be had between a responsible parent and their teenager).

I also appreciated her use of mixing present tense and flashbacks. This technique aids character development, builds suspense and intrigue, and provides context for present events. You're constantly learning new things about Snowman, Crake, and Oryx and their intertwined pasts that explain their present lives.

Where it fell short for me was Crake's lack of likability. He felt Elon Musk-like to me—but with this written 20+ years ago, Atwood certainly had a sense of things to come. Also, it felt like the pace of the world that was built didn’t match the pace of the book. I wanted it to move along quickly.

Many people felt unsatisfied with the ending's ambiguity. It was the best way to end the novel. Not only does it keep the door open for sequels, but it also left me pondering what might have been versus what was.

As we see headlines of more intense natural disasters, inventors pushing the limits of what's possible, and genetic engineering of food, this book—as "old" as it might be—is prescient and timely. It should be included in great dystopian fiction alongside works like "1984" and "Brave New World." Perhaps it shouldn't be banned because it raises the questions future generations should be considering so they can create a future they want to live in.

I rarely do this, but I abandoned this book just about 3/4 of the way through.

I realized that I just wasn't enjoying it anymore. Atwood's dystopia is a broad caricature of a hyper-capitalist future filled with clichéd, George Saunders-esque portmanteau satires on corporate naming (CorpSeCorps, Pigoon). With a more generous scholar's eye I can see how that vision may have been prescient and counter-cultural when it was published in 2003 in the shadow of 9/11, but dystopia has been fleshed out and deconstructed in media in the years since, and now it reads as flat and thinly characterized.

Her imagination of a teen boyhood in which these adolescents have been so numbed to exploitation that child pornography, executions, and animal torture are treated as normal entertainment options among many seems heavily influenced by A Clockwork Orange and maybe this is my old age speaking—one of the great surprises of adulthood is learning that I basically have no interest in the hyper-violent media that would have lit me up in high school—but I think that Clockwork came out of a particular context and it's assumptions about how culture and morality interact should be looked at a little more critically than they are in Oryx and Crake.

One more critique:

I thought the whole storyline involving how the boys "met" Oryx was tasteless and irresponsible. There are many real life stories about men getting obsessed by girls they encounter in porn, and I think that there's a certain seriousness and gravity to those stories that demand good, rigorous storytelling if they are to be fictionalized.

Interesting, but the pacing was glacial. The true payoff didn't come until the last 40 pages and it felt like some work to get there, with too much extraneous detail. I'm somewhat intrigued by the ideas of the next 2 books, but not sure that I want to devote the time to them.