Product Description

Margaret Atwood's classic novel, THE HANDMAID'S TALE, is about the future. Now, in ORYX AND CRAKE, the future has changed. It's much worse. And we're well on the road to it now. The narrator of Margaret Atwood's riveting new novel is Snowman, self-named though not self-created. As the story begins, he's sleeping in a tree, wearing a dirty old bedsheet, mourning the loss of his beautiful and beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. Earlier, Snowman's life was one of comparative privilege. How did everything fall apart so quickly? Was he himself in any way responsible? Why is he now left alone with his bizarre memories - except for the more-than-perfect, green-eyed Children of Crake, who think of him as a kind of monster? He explores the answers to these questions in the double journey he takes - into his own past, and back to Crake's high-tech bubble dome, where the Paradice Project unfolded and the world came to grief. With breathtaking command of her shocking material and with her customary sharp wit and dark humour, Atwood projects us into a less-than-brave new world, an outlandish yet wholly believable space populated by a cast of characters who will continue to inhabit your dreams long after the last chapter. This is Margaret Atwood at the absolute peak of her powers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #53688 in Books
• Published on: 2003-05-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 400 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
"In the beginning, there was chaos..." Margaret Atwood's chilling new novel Oryx and Crake moves beyond the futuristic fantasy of her 1985 bestseller The Handmaid’s Tale to an even more dystopian world, a world where language--and with it anything beyond the merest semblance of humanity--has almost entirely vanished.

Snowman may be the last man on earth, the only survivor of an unnamed apocalypse. Once he was Jimmy, a member of a scientific elite; now he lives in bitter isolation and loneliness, his only pleasure the watching of old films on DVD. His mind moves backwards and forwards through time, from an agonising trawl through memory to relive the events that led up to sudden catastrophe (most significantly the disappearance of his mother and the arrival of his mysterious childhood companions Oryx and Crake, symbols of the fractured society in which Snowman now finds himself, to the horrifying present of genetic engineering run amok. His only witnesses, eager to lap up his testimony, are "Crakers", laboratory creatures of varying strengths and abilities, who can offer little comfort. Gradually the reasons behind the disaster begin to unfold as Snowman undertakes a perilous journey to the remains of the bubble-dome complex where the sinister Paradice Project collapsed and near-global devastation began.

This, Atwood’s 11th novel, confirms her as one of our most contemporary novelists. Darkly humorous and icily prescient, Oryx and Crake shows a writer deeply concerned with the stark moral issues facing the human race, and accords a glimpse of a future that lies all too uneasily within reach. --Catherine Taylor

Review
A marvellous, wonderfully written atmospheric story set well into the future, which is grim indeed, and full of horrors following 'the disease'. Jimmy, now known as Snowman, is a survivor, and we follow his life both before and after the catastrophe. Oryx and Crake are shadowy figures from the past, who influence the present, and the whole book has a nightmarish vision of reality. This is a major piece of fiction by a supremely talented author; a novel to haunt your dreams, full of characters and animals who are only too lifelike.

About the Author
Margaret Atwood's books have been published in over thirty-five countries. She is the author of more than thirty works, which include fiction, poetry and critical essays. Of her novels, THE HANDMAID'S TALE, CAT'S EYE and ALIAS GRACE also won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy. Her most recent novel, THE BLIND ASSASSIN, won the 2000 Booker Prize. She lives in Toronto, with writer Graeme Gibson. ORYX AND CRAKE is her eleventh novel.

Customer Reviews

limpid contemporary apocalypse/creation myth
In Oryx and Crake Margaret Atwood returns to Handmaid's Tale territory insofar as this is a dystopian vision of the future, and insofar as the central character, Jimmy/Snowman both mourns the loss of a dearly beloved object and berates himself for not having foreseen a destructive cataclysm, through the consequences of which he is now struggling to survive. The novel bears other Atwood hallmarks too - the limpid prose and the beguiling narrative structure of deceptive simplicity.

Jimmy's past is an all-too-recognisable future of gated communities living in fear of the 'pleeblands' outside, of genetic engineering on demand turned to the gratification of our shallowest desires, and of entertainment on tap from internet porn and destructive wargames simulating extinction. His present is a world which has lost all familiar features and where he himself faces extinction, but has also been reinvented as the source of creation myths for a community of the Children of Crake, on the one hand monstrous freaks of genetically redesigned humans, herbivorous and with added features such as the sexual displays of baboons and the purring of cats, but minus impulses such as lust and aggression. These creatures begin more and more to appear like the noble savages, the ideal primitive people, described by writers such as Montaigne, and Jimmy is caught in a web of confusion as to his place with them -to protect or to resent, as he is drawn into the role of the semi-divine, wholly alien storyteller and shaman explaining their beginnings and their place in this unrecognisable world around them: imagine Lord of the Flies told from the point of view of the pig's head on the stick.

This is not a novel that gives easy answers and, as with the Handmaid's Tale, we are left with an ending of multiple possibilities. A brilliant, unforgettable read.

last man standing
Given that much of Atwood's latest book relies on an Armageddon of modern biotechnology, she does well to avoid the pitfall of blinding us with science. Indeed Oryx and Crake is a wholly accessible dip into what our world could become if corporate nature-bending increases its steady grip in the name of progress.

Oryx and Crake is the story of Snowman, the last man on earth. Quite how he got to be, living in a tree with a sheet wrapped round him for protection, surviving on rotting fruit and rain water collected in beer bottles, as we first encounter him in chapter one, gradually unravels. Atwood mixes the present with the past seamlessly as it transpires that Snowman, formerly Jimmy, grew up closeted in a scientific compound with dysfunctional parents more intent on splicing breeds of animals to create new species, than nurturing their son. And so Jimmy meets Crake. Crake becomes his mentor but still fails to offer him the emotional support Jimmy craves.

Atwood develops Jimmy and Crake, and every other character, on cold hard lines. They obsess in the seedy world of internet pornographic voyeurism gone mad - it is here they first see the abused child Oryx . There's a mirror to the detached stark work of the unwavering science, the happy pills, the spliced new breeds, the high security corporate compounds to keep out the anarchistic and low life pleebland dwellers - or the "ordinary" people.

It is dealt with by Atwood's deft touch and managing to just toe behind the line of sensationalism and the graphic. A hint at the stuff of nightmares, a civilisation and a world being destroyed in every sense.

In the main, Oryx and Crake deals with some (less than) grand themes. And although it sometimes feels like we are merely being treated to some heady headlines with a lack of depth in places, this was surely Atwood's raison d'etre. Finishing the book one is left with a smack of sadness and little hope for the future as it is developing. It is nonetheless a rewarding and stimulating read. Atwood never fails to deliver eloquent and captivating prose and in Oryx and Crake she's pulled it off again.

Paradice Lost
This is the first time I've read a book by Margaret Atwood (my interest piqued by the intriguing cover) and I'm pleased to say it won't be my last.

This is a book that grabs your attention from the very first sentence and never lets go, dragging you further and further into the nightmare world of an all to possible near future. Who is the Snowman? Why is he alone? Who/what are the Children of Crake? The answers Atwood reveals slowly, as she describes a world not unlike our own - apart from the pigoons, wolvogs and rakunks and the fact that the midday sun can burn the skin from your back. The geological world has changed but the human world certainly hasn't. If anything, it's got worse. Technologies such as the Internet, GM food and genetic engineering are taken to their logical and depressing conclusions. Anyone familiar with 'Transmetropolitan' won't be surprised by the themes explored.

In terms of 'lone survivor in a hostile environment' genre, 'Oryx & Crake' shares similarities with 'I Am Legend' - Snowman (short for Abominable Snowman), sees himself as a creature of myth; the last human left alive. But unlike Matheson's book, the explicit reasons for the final catastrophe are revealed in a horrifying climax, the causes of which are slowly hinted at as the story unfolds through Snowman's memories.

Atwood's skill lies in taking what is merely theory now and having it treated as commonplace by her characters. The horror of the book lies in the fact that it could happen. In some instances events have already overtaken fiction and the seeds of our (possible), destruction have already been sown.

Not a preachy, or po-faced book by any means (there's a surprising amount of humour) but certainly one that makes you stop and think, with characters and events that will haunt you long after the final page. Thoroughly recommended.