Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Sometimes doing novel studies in school is pretty beneficial. Now here I have a bold CANADIAN writer for my sad (and small) audience, and I have to say that I really enjoyed reading and studying this cryptic novel. Enjoy my fellow bookworms.

  The narrator of Atwood's riveting novel calls himself Snowman. When the story opens, he is sleeping in a tree, wearing an old bed sheet, mourning the loss of his beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. He searches for supplies in a wasteland where insects proliferate and pigoons and wolvogs ravage the pleeblands, where ordinary people once lived, and the Compounds that sheltered the extraordinary. As he tries to piece together what has taken place, the narrative shifts to decades earlier. How did everything fall apart so quickly? Why is he left with nothing but his haunting memories? Alone except for the 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 Paradise Project unfolded and the world came to grief.

Now here is a writer that is not afraid to challenge the path that humanity may be heading in the future. This dystopian novel is set in an apocalyptic world, with a juicy plot told through a series of flashbacks. Using a great amount of satire Atwood takes what she sees as problems in our current society, and shows what the consequences will be in the future.

There are several themes that emerge in Oryx and Crake; for example the constant battle between the importance of arts and sciences. In Atwood’s world the humanities and the tantalizing power of believing in the unknown has disappeared. She reflects on sustainable resources, the growing gap between the rich and poor, as well as what living in a world ruled by corporations would be like.

All of the parallels between this fiction world and ours effectively proves Atwood’s point that there needs to be change. Even though the novel is an interpretative fiction,  the beautifully dark story holds you right from the beginning.

5 OUT OF 5 for this one. This is the first book in a trilogy. http://www.margaretatwood.ca/ I will get to reading the second one `Year Of The Flood`when I can.

Next is a story about a man who loved books too much!

MMR - out