Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
In a world where he might be the last person alive, Snowman, formerly known as Jimmy, is fighting for survival while grieving the deaths of his best buddy Crake and the lovely but elusive Oryx that they both adored. With the aid of the green-eyed Children of Crake, Snowman travels through the lush wilderness that was once a great city before ruthless corporations drove humanity on an unrestrained genetic engineering ride in search of answers. Margaret Atwood imagines a near future for us that is both all too real and unimaginable.
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
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The storyline is rather simple: we follow Jimmy as he grows up alongside his mad scientist friend Crake, who later becomes his boss. And we watch Jimmy as he fights to survive in a world that has been devastated by Crake. A few years after this mad scientist’s experiments, the book begins. Jimmy is both alone and not alone since Crake developed a group of people who had been genetically altered in a lab to precisely fit their environment. Crake also tried to remove any “undesirable” components from the human fabric. Jimmy cares for these individuals, whom he refers to as the Crakers, who are human yet of such a unique species that he is still completely alone.
The narrative is divided into parts that are set in Jimmy’s present, where he cares for the Crakers, and his past, which examines the world before the Crakers were born and everyone else was wiped out. The chapters set in the past have a purposeful haziness to them, and Jimmy interjects commentary on his memories, but the plot is very obviously rooted in Jimmy’s present. Atwood makes it obvious that what we are reading is present-day Jimmy remembering his own life, not an objective narrative jump to the past. This work, like Winterson’s Weight, investigates the essence of the narrative and how we create our own futures by interpreting the past.
