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Summary: Is this where we are heading?
Review: Having never read, or even heard of, Margaret Atwood, I had no idea what to expect when a coworker loaned me this book. Little did I know that it would capture me like a fat guy in a comic shop.The book opens with the main character, who calls himself Snowman, on a dim-future beachfront in a daily daze and slowly works itself back to his beginning through a series of flashbacks. The book reveals a past (future) full of bioengineering and mankind playing god to the tune of "Jeopardy!" Quite reminiscent of a modern "Brave New World," the book takes the headlines of today and makes them into the sinister ailments of a yesterday that let mankind down. But more than that, it is also a novel about people. Setting up a dichotomy between "Snowman" and "Crake" much like the one that exists in Hesse's "Narcissus and Goldmund", with Snowman acting as the emotion/body and Crake as the theorist/mind. With dark scenes like something out of Orwell's "1984" as well as displays of unambiguous love the story of Snowman and the fall of mankind play out in a personal story that brings this tenacious bum from the realm of pergatorial observer to sainthood. In reading it, I couldn't help but think of it as an answer to Daniel Quinn's "Ishmael" and "The Story of B" and the question of where are we headed as a people....
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Summary: Plausible and Unsettling
Review: I finished this book the same weekend I went to see "28 Days Later"...potent combo. In one of the previous reviews, someone had criticized the book for being "too real" which I thought was silly, but upon completing the book, I knew what the reader was trying to say. You're not left feeling at all happy, I for one felt sad and disturbed because the books premise is entirely possible. The more I look around at present day events, it looks almost obvious that humanity is heading into it's closing chapter similar to that detailed in the book...yet one holds out hope. The writing itself is excellent and Snowman is a prosaic character as well as a credible narrator. I put this one in my list of top shelf Speculative/Science Fiction novels.
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Summary: Great read!
Review: This was definately one of Atwood's best. The Blind Assassin is still #1 but Oryx and Crake is close to the top. It is very reminiscent of Handmaid's Tale. Definately a bleak look at the future- but it makes you think. I love how she slowly reveals information of the world and gives you a piece at a time.
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Summary: Atwood's Best?
Review: Perhaps not. In terms of her use of language, form, depth of charaterisation etc. the 'The Blind Assassin' is technically Atwood's greatest novel so far. But having read all her novels, I've got to say that 'Oryx and Crake' is my personal favourite. I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed this book, how engrossed I was with every word, and how moving, shocking and disturbing I found it. It's one of the best books I've ever read. It's one of those books that, once you've finished the last page, stays with you, and when you're not reading it you're thinking of it. And it's one of those books that, when you finally close it, you so wish that you could've put your name to it yourself. It's an immense work of imagination. I finished it well over a week ago and still think of it. I found it extraordinary. The way Atwood evokes her distopian futuristic world in every detail and makes it come alive and breathe is quite incredible. I was hooked. I was hoping it would be good but it far exceeded my expectations. The book's nightmarish vision of the future makes 'The Handmaid's Tale' look like a picnic, and while you're reading Atwood makes you live in that world, makes you feel what Snowman is feeling. What horror. Frighteningly, plausibly, brilliant!
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Summary: very good, but not as brilliant as i had hoped
Review: Ever since I read The Handmaid's Tale, I have been a fan of Margaret Atwood. She is fiercely creative and a major talent. Just as The Handmaid's Tale is a dark vision of a possible future, so is Oryx and Crake. Oryx and Crake takes a future where genetic manipulation and genetic engineering is now the norm and the science of the future. It is gleamed out of some realities of the present and stretched to a dystopian conclusion. Even though I made a comparison to The Handmaid's Tale, that comparison will stop now because Oryx and Crake (as well as everything else that Atwood wrote) will come up short in comparison to that masterpiece. Suffice it to say that Oryx and Crake isn't quite as good or as deep as The Handmaid's Tale, but that is an unfair comparison. The only thing the two books have in common is that there is a dystopian vision of the future. The narrator is a young man named Snowman. He is essentially alone on a beach. There is nobody else quite like him alive. Snowman is an un-altered human. There are other people, whom he calls Crakers, but they are images of perfection and genetically altered so much that there is little vestige of what we might imagine as being human. Most the true humanity has been wiped off the planet and what is left is genetically altered humans/Crakers and altered wildlife/plant life. The novel works in two ways. One, we follow Snowman as he lives in the present (as far as the novel is concerned) and how he interacts with the Crakers. We follow him on a journey as he travels across the land to get to where everything started. Two, Snowman remembers the past and we are given glimpses into his life as a child, and as he grows up and how the catastrophe occurred. It is in this way that we meet the title characters Oryx and Crake. Crake was his childhood friend and also the architect of how the world turned out. Oryx was the woman that Snowman fell in love with not long before humanity was destroyed. This is a fast reading novel and it was very interesting to read. It did not seem to have the social and emotional depth that I have come to expect from Margaret Atwood, but I did like the book. Ultimately, Oryx and Crake will probably turn out to be a forgettable novel, but it was well done and was interesting enough to keep me reading.
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Summary: An excellent and engrossing "scientific fiction"
Review: Honestly, at first I didn't think I liked this book. I bought it on advice, read one or two chapters, and lost interest. Then one day a few weeks later, I decided to pick it up and literally never put it down until I finished it. The first few chapters area sort of crash course in immersion, Atwood throws around images, words, and "people" that you can't really place. An impatient soul could get frustrated. But stay with her, and the payoff is big. What you get is every American's worst nightmare relaized, and you love every minute of it. The protagonist unfolds a story of love, friendship, and the worst betrayal imaginable. Almost all the characters in this book are already dead, but the protagonist makes them tangible with his reminiscing, much like the book "Rebecca." Oryx and Crake reminded me of Rebecca due to the fact that you heard their story through the one-sided view of someone else, yet they managed to become three dimensional through your own imagination of their motives.
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Summary: Remember when voting mattered?
Review: Atwood's newest book is a fast-forward view of where technology seems to be propelling us; a bio-engineered Tower of Babel where we create new species for convienence and/or entertainment. As the other reviewers have said, there's nothing in this book that will go over the head of anyone who watches the news on a regular basis. I was particularly amused by Jimmy's talent for mocking his elders, which I am one generation senior to. I hear myself making those plaintive cries for a world half-remembered and reworked by imagination. Atwood's talent for taking her characters on intellectual sojourns in the midst of chaos is in fine form here; I too went for the dictionary to look up the words that tumbled through Snowman's mind as he wandered the new landscape. Entertaining enough to be a good read but ultimately too depressing to be totally enjoyable. I have a few issues with the book too, but I can't go into them without spoilers. Basically, I want to know why Glenn felt the need to compel Jimmy to do what he did. Was it to avoid guilt? To remove himself from the equation? Why did he have to destroy the other as well? One more point: this book seemed to be a removed cousin of the work of Chuck Palahinuk. If you're a regular Atwood reader who enjoyed the would-anyone-notice-if-the-world-ended? undertones you might want to check out "Lullaby" or "Survivor". Four stars; five for a solid underpinning and three for being a little too realistic.
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Summary: Wonderfully read by Campbell Scott
Review: I gave the audio CD of Oryx and Crake four stars, but the reading by Campbell Scott specifically deserves five stars. Scott reads the story so well that you forget about him and just listen to the tale. The story itself, a dystopian vision of unfettered genetic engineering married to oligarchic market economics, is smart and original. The first one-third of the story moves rather slowly, however. And I found the ending somewhat unsatisfying in that several questions about character motivation remain unanswered. Nonetheless, the story drew me in and continues to resonate in my mind.
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Summary: Atwood's finest book yet
Review: this chilling book is Atwood's best book yet.
Rating:
Summary: When societal oversight of genetics R&D is bypassed
Review: It's not far-fetched or even very futuristic: genetics research is being privately funded by the mass sales of irresistibly appealing pharmaceuticals and therapeutic biotechnology--aphrodesiacs, youth-restoratives, designer offspring. Runaway competition among the top players in the genetic technology field had led to the construction of huge gated, guarded, and self-contained communities for the families of each lab's staff and administation. The lab research runs on, devoid of oversight and regulation by any wider society. The "wider society" is what lies outside the gates of these research communities. They are the so-called "pleeblands"--where the underprivileged plebes live, with their dreams of immortality and their governments that have become totally irrelevant to the forces of technology that define the future of life on the planet. And that future includes a vast array of new varieties and species of plants, animals, and microbes, most engineered with profit in mind. Think about chickens with breastmeat tumors and numerous wing and drumstick appendages for marketing to the fast-food chicken industries. Think about superviruses engineered to produce total homeland insecurity, should the need for it arise. What looms large in award-winning author Margaret Atwood's new novel, Oryx and Crake, is the power of top scientists to impose their own values and standards--and biases and whims--upon the future of planetary life. Her protagonists are realistically drawn with typical "baggage" left from childhood experience, the hidden motives that affect all human choices. She shows us a future that is already so present that it doesn't strike us as particularly nightmarish. It's believable and entirely possible, if the governments of the world neglect to legislate regulatory protocols that pertain to all research, both publicly and privately funded. Everyone currently engaged in genethics discussions and other genetics-and-religion conversations is already aware of such a possible future. This scenario is the reason to remain vigilant and proactively sceptical of the claims of "forge-ahead science" for limitless progress and therapeutic benefit for humanity.
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