Oryx and Crake

  

      Oryx and Crake is a disturbing epic that takes place in a post apocalyptic wasteland just a few weeks after a devastating man made plague has nearly extincted humanity. A lone survivor by the name of Snowman struggles with a wildly fluctuating climate as well as a menagerie of genetically engineered animals. The biggest threat are the pigoons, giant pigs originally farmed for human organ transplants. Some of them even have human brain tissue, originally developed by none other than Snowman's scientist father.     

      This isn't what most of the story is, however. Most of the story takes place in Snowman's flashbacks, when he still went by Jimmy and the world is separated into sprawling mega-slums called pleeblands and heavily militarized corporate city-states where the world's ruling class lives. Jimmy grew up in one of these compounds to a genetic engineer father and a mother who eventually becomes so disgusted with the compound that she escapes to join the environmental resistance. This environmental resistance is largely made up by a naturalist Christian religion called the God's Gardeners. But more on them later.

      By starting Jimmy's flashbacks in his early childhood, Atwood makes the reader analyze Jimmy's psyche from adolescence all the way up to his present self. A lot is revealed about his unhappy childhood and the effects his mother's absence has on him in particular. Combined with all the weird sexual stuff, it gives the book a Freudian feel.    

      Snowman isn't actually totally alone. He shares the wasteland with the ultimate genetic creation, a race of perfect, aesthetically pleasing humans called the children of Crake designed and created by his childhood  friend and genetic prodigy Glenn, who later takes the name Crake. They look like humans, but they mature to adulthood in just 7 years and die at age 30. They are herbivorous, living off of plants, roots, berries, and their own poop. The poop thing lets them get as much nutrients from a sparse diet as possible, and that ability was given to them by Crake from certain real life rabbit species. They are born with totally random skin colors in part to prevent racism from building in their tribal society. Also, they all emit natural insect deterrent sweat that makes them smell like citrus. Their most important attribute is that female children of Crake go into heat once a month and select multiple mates at a time. That way the children of Crake aren't constantly occupied with sex and experience none of the complications and pain caused by romantic love.


    The relationship between Jimmy and Glenn was one of my favorite parts of the book. It is tense and painful to read because Jimmy desperately wants companionship, but Glenn is basically a sociopath. He uses Jimmy as a pawn in his plot to extinct humanity with his engineered 100% fatal disease so that the children of Crake can inherit the rapidly re-greening Earth. Jimmy is hired as the advertising manager of a combination birth control/STD vaccine/aphrodisiac super drug, which is what Crake uses in secret to disseminate his plague. This is what keeps Jimmy occupied, but in reality Crake's plan is for Jimmy to become the protector of the children of Crake. Snowman fulfills this role and leads them across the wasteland to the coast, where they settle.  

     Glenn and Jimmy spend a lot of their free time together watching porno and public executions online, which at this point in the future is basically a normal thing to do. Sex and violence has become the ultimate commodity and the sex trade is a massive industry with an entire corporation devoted to it called SeksMart (dumb name). Watching child pornography together one day (I told you, its a very disturbing book) Jimmy first sees Oryx, who he later falls in love with after Crake finds her in the pleeblands and employs her to help with his genetic projects.    

   Snowman discovers that Crake's plague didn't kill everyone however. Snowman is told about a group of people that the children of Crake saw wandering the wasteland and he sets off to find them as he struggles with a severely infected foot. The book ends on a major cliffhanger as a feverish and starving Snowman reaches a group of three survivors gathered around a fire, the first humans he has seen since the plague.