Oryx and Crake

Rating:
Summary: Future or present?
Review: Atwood once again demonstrates her skills in this unusual tale, which ranges from a story made up of memories to a future that may or may not be bleak by having no people left in the world. The nighmarish world that Snowman inhabits before the "present" in the narrative is accepted nearly without question, and Atwood paints a strangley familiar picture of a world with invented words and an impatient ignorance that is truly frightening. The main character is largely alone in the story, save his memories of his life up to this point, and Atwood weaves in and out of daydreams and his life story, as well as his observations of the Crakers, a strange group of people who seem to be his only human contact.

Rating:
Summary: This book is amazing...
Review: ...and Atwood is one of the last people I would have expected to write it. It reminds me of Hesse's Demain; something written by an older, established author that speaks to the younger generation. If the name of some unknown twentysomething had been on the cover instead of Atwood's, I wouldn't have been at all surprised, but it's all the more to her credit that she was able to make this uncharacterstic effort.

Straightforward, moralizing dystopia a la 1984 this isn't; it's closer, I think, to Stephenson's Snow Crash, though better by a long shot. It does carry a conservation message of a kind, but its value is just in the sheer scope and imagination of the world it creates, and the humanity of the characters in that world. The future of every modern trend is shown in grand satiric tradition: immobile chicken plants, a proliferation of live internet snuff films and colleges bidding for students, but there are no clear good guys - griping lefty college students are described as 'bulls*** technicians,' and in one particularly funny scene the anti-chicken-plant activists attempt to 'liberate' the chicken plants from their habitat; a TV anchor observes 'can they even walk?'

The three main characters carry the plot handily; Jimmy is believable and likeable, while Crake is dramatic and enviable, anime-ish. Their motivations as individuals can be seperated from the trends of their society - notice that what ultimatley results in apocalypse are not the trends leading society into decline, but a desire to reverse those trends and improve humanity. Crake's tragedy is personal. The passages in the 'present' are also effective, showing that life endures even after apocalypse, and providing some very tense moments. Again, the real strength of the book is how modern it seems; the vernacular, fashion trends and changing human relations are both recognizable from the present and plausible-seeming as a future. The only thing that annoys me somewhat is the overt symbolism in the 'games'-you'll see what I mean.

A lot of young Americans probably wanted to write this book, but only an author as accomplished as Atwood could pull it off succesfully.

Rating:
Summary: A gloomy future indeed!
Review: Atwood's latest is a not-too-distant future portrait of a world on the brink of destruction, not through nuclear holocaust but through bio-engineering run amok. Our hero Jimmy's world is that of a privileged scientific elite working on all sorts of secret projects, behind the walls of compounds sealed off from the "plebelands," which overpopulation, food shortages, drugs and sex have turned into a futuristic version of the Wild West. We soon learn the elite are in prisons of their own making, and those within who express doubts about what's going on mysteriously disappear or commit suicide.

Jimmy is the odd man out in this world--he loves words and books, which are rapidly disappearing as science becomes the highest and only source of knowledge. He's a misfit who is sidetracked to a college that's a relic of the 20th century--the Martha Graham school, named after the famous dancer and choreographer. But Jimmy's best friend, the brilliant Crake, has risen in the power structure and rescues him by recruiting him to write ad copy for the latest products to transform human beings into perfect immortals.

Crake's top-secret project is nothing less than to create a perfect, beautiful, docile species of human, ideally suited to live in a world ravaged by pollution, subject to wild unpredictable storms, missing the ozone layer. But even Jimmy doesn't know what the other half of Crake's plan really is.

It took me a long time to get into this book, but I finally managed, intrigued by Atwood's descriptions of an Internet run wild, newly created species of lethal animals, and a world that at once is fantasy but so familiar--a world where once again money and power rule and only the inhuman survive. But the characters are hard to take--Jimmy is most unappealing, and his lover Oryx a cipher. Crake's motives are hard to discern, and the other characters are caricatures of 20th century types.

The first science fiction type work of Atwood's that I read was "The Handmaid's Tale," which I remember enjoying more than this somewhat similar story. Atwood is obviously intrigued by the genre, but the unremitting sense of doom and wooden characters are hard to take. I liked "The Blind Assassin" much better--it has a fantasy element that ties into a real story about flesh and blood characters. Try that one instead.

Rating:
Summary: A huge disappointment
Review: I truly expected something much better from Margaret Atwood. What I got was a disjointed substandard set of scenes, never developed properly - and held together by only the flimsiest of plot lines. After reading this book, I told a family member that it reminded me of cheap X-rated movies; everything seemed to serve only as placeholders for sleazy sex scenarios. If this was the only book by Margaret Atwood that someone had read, they would think she was a frustrated screenwriter for low budget adult movies.

This book was so bad that I threw it out. I wouldn't want to inflict this poor excuse for a novel on anyone. And if this is where her writing is going-it will be the last Atwood book I ever read. And that is a very sad thing to have to say about any author.

Rating:
Summary: Hits a little close to home
Review: As with Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale - I spent much of the beginning of this book feeling as if I had blinders on - that I could see what was in front of me but my peripheral vision was a bit cloudy.

Oryx & Crake is a vision of what our world could be like all too soon. One would like to say that her predictions are far-fetched but the visions of companies that start to control the world, a society obsessed with porn and reality TV, bio-tech scares and manufactured news seem all too familiar.

Atwood's writing style is as clear and enjoyable as ever, but I did feel as if she didn't spend much time developing the characters. I don't think the the three main characters changed much throughout the book - which was disappointing but not enough to make me stop reading.

I enjoyed 90% of the book but was disappointed with the ending. After the build-up and all the hints and foreshadowing - I felt a huge letdown when nothing startling was revealed at the end. "That's it?" Plus - though I am not one that demands closure - far from it - I needed the main character to take just a few more steps before it ended.

This was a good book but and most of my criticism comes from comparison to other Atwood books - not from displeasure with this one.

Recommended but not without a couple of words of warning.

Rating:
Summary: Oryx and Crake...
Review: This book was good, but definitely not Atwood's best. I agree with many of the reviewers that the characters could have been more fleshed out, and the protagonist could have been more sympathetic. At the end, I think I understood him, but did not really like him or care much about him.

The premise of the story was excellent. The dystopian future was very funny, and very frightening because corporations today are trying to do what the ones in the book had already done.

The questions left unanswered or that were not spelled out in the book actually help the story in my opinion. You pretty much know all the answers at the end even though you are not told.

I liked Oryx and Crake, but not really Jimmy. He was too 'average under achiever Joe'

All in all this book is very good, but would have needed more 'feeling' to be great.

Rating:
Summary: Utter Drivel!
Review: DO NOT READ THIS BOOK! If I can spare just one person from the dissapointment of this book, then I've done my Job. Briefly, here's why Oryx & Crake is banal tripe:

1. The main character is completely unsympathetic and has no arc.
2. The MC's relationships are shoddy, incomplete and uninteresting.
3. There's no conflict (or very little) throughout the story and the MC is never put in any real and lasting jeopardy.
4. The actions (and writing) seem forced and deliberate - there are no surprises in this story.
5. The concepts Ms. Atwood puts forth regarding "our" future are ludicrous to the point of being laughable (except the story's so bad that you want to cry). She never substantiates any of her conclusions about the future, she just throws them out there as if she just thought them up and thought that they'd be "really neat". They're not.
6. Even at the end of the story, no conclusions have been made. Our MC has learned nothing, has not grown in any way, and leaves us just the same as when we started, with nothing.

I could go into greater detail, but I already feel that I've done this book (and Margaret Atwood) more credit than it deserves. If I could give this book NO STARS a surely would. As for the author, I will never read anything written by her again.

Rating:
Summary: Sci Fi of the Mind
Review: Science Fiction is tricky. It's best done as drama or comedy on its own, that happen stance places in a science fiction world. Stories that obsess with being science fiction rather than happening to be science fiction suffer. Margaret Atwood has great feel for science fiction of the mind in ORYX AND CRAKE. The writing is reminiscent of the better books of the ENDER'S GAME series by ORSON SCOTT CARD.

Rating:
Summary: Well done
Review: "Oryx and Crake" finds in solid form, if not quite as strong as her very best books. Like "The Handmaid's Tale", O&C is a dystopian satire, this time warning about unbridled science in general and genetic manipulation in particular. As she often does, Atwood starts in the middle and works her way to the outside edges, filling in the story slowly. The effect is marvelous to behold, pulling the reader along effortlessly.

I probably would have liked it still more had I shared to a substantial degree her concern for genetic manipulation. Still, the book is time and money well spent.

Rating:
Summary: Dystopian or Apocalyptic?
Review: Yes, I know; the book starts out with a world now several years ended. Yet much of the book is itself dystopian - elitism, radical inequality, and military-style corporate sealed compounds - rather than apocalyptic. Atwood writes the post-apocalyptic details almost as an afterthought, it seems. The real plot is the genetic mega-corporations; this includes plot threads on the protagonist's childhood that seem strangely reminiscent of the "Hulk" Summer 2003 movie.

Maybe it's me. Maybe I'm tired of this whole "the current plot is just a device to tell the real story, introducing a "present" track to tell the "past" track. Maybe I've tired of that Anne Rice contrivance (admittedly, she has only abused it, not invented it), or perhaps its the oddly flat characters in the book. Maybe it's that nothing is ever really explained; I realize this places the reader firmly in the protagonist's shoes, but this ends up strangely unsatisfying.

Consider: what was actually wrong with his mother? What really happenned to her? What was the deal with Oryx? Why was there so much death and porn and pedophilia? What were Crake's final motivations? What was Oryx's role in all this? Was she really the child from that photo? What was her final condition prior to her death? Her complicity? Crake's? What of the ending?

Of course, I have other issues. The noxious tendency of sci-fi to place us in familiar settings then give us new words: bobkitty, pigoon, rakunk, and so forth. I find the practice fairly nauseating in certain contexts, particularly the "oh, the protagonist takes this for granted, but the author doesn't bother to fill the reader in for 250 pages!" In "On the Beach" by Nevil Shute, the end of the world by an obscenely large amount of cobalt bombs is casually mentioned in the first 1/4 of the book or so, yet it is startling and fresh. Here, the "oh by the way"-isms that the protagonist takes for granted fall flat for the reader.

I don't know. I did finish the book in one sitting, and that does say something. I am reading "The Plague" by Albert Camus right now, and can't seem to do more than 30 pages without nodding off. Of course, that's because I keep waiting for the end of the world, have gone past the 2/3 point, and am still in the same town, and not even under extreme conditions. Perhaps I should re-read the 5 or so pages Atwood spend actually talking about the end of the world, in a way reminiscent to the newspaper clippings on the world's end by plague in "12 Monkeys." I find that entire matter fascinating, perhaps because I feel we take our world for granted and/or I want out of it but feel unable to leave on my own power... not "out of the world" as in death, but rather out of the artificial societal construct we have entombed ourselves in already. Wishful thinking I suppose, but deliciously wishful, I would say nonetheless.

Back to Atwood. She took a long time to say very little indeed. Certain points - the pigoon ambush/stakeout, for example - seemed rather heavy-handedly staged. The last 20 pages or so seemed rather rushed, the ending abrupt and, as I mentioned, unsatisfying. Finally, the other two characters, Oryx and Crake, remained non-people, but in a way different than "the Children of Crake."

And while, admittedly biased as a biblical scholar, I take great issue with the idea of "breeding out" the more "troublesome aspects" of humanity. I am not offended, per se; I just find it the height of naiivete that anyone could believe we could successfully "breed out" or "splice out" those unpleasant elements of humanity which are not, in fact, problems not genetic in nature at all. This is like trying to stitch the protagonist's wounded, pus-ridden, infected foot back together and thus believe that, because it is now whole from the outside, there are no more germs on the inside! Just like the wounded foot carried a less serious outer wound worsened by a far more sinister and invisible inner wound, so are we humans. Stitching our genes together one way or another will not change the deeper, inner wound that no genetics could ever touch. The infection in our nature would simply burst out, breaking the sutures and possibly killing the patient (and all around him), as well.

Atwood's book, in short, took a long time to say a few simple things... much like this review, I suppose...