Items related to Oryx and Crake
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 bleaker. And we're well on the road to it now. The narrator is Snowman (a man once known as Jimmy), 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. Crake and Jimmy live with all the other smart, rich people in the Compounds - gated company towns owned by biotech corporations. (Ordinary folks are kept outside the gates in the chaotic 'pleeblands'.) Meanwhile, beautiful Oryx, raised as a child prostitute in Southeast Asia, finds her way to the West and meets Crake and Jimmy, setting up an inevitable love triangle. 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
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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.
Review:
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
'Oryx and Crake is Atwood at her best - dark, dry, scabrously witty, yet moving and studded with flashes of pure poetry. Her gloriously inventive brave new world is all the more chilling because of the mirror it holds up to our own. Citizens, be warned.' Independent 'Oryx and Crake can hold its own against any of the 20th century's most potent dystopias - Brave New World, 1984, The Space Merchants - with regard to both dramatic impact and fertility of invention Oryx and Crake showcases a nightmare version of the present era of globalization on a globe coming apart at its ecological seams It is a scathing (because bang-on) portrait of the way we live now Majestic' Washington Post 'Contemporary novelists rarely write about science or technology. Margaret Atwood tackles both - and more - in one of the year's most surprising novels' Economist 'Oryx and Crake is Atwood at her playful, allegorical best' Globe and Mail
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- PublisherBloomsbury Publishing PLC
- Publication date2009
- ISBN 10 1408802775
- ISBN 13 9781408802779
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages400
- Rating
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