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Oryx and Crake

by Margaret Atwood
Doubleday, New York, 2003
386 pp.  Trade, $26.00
ISBN: 0-385-50385-7.

Reviewed by George Gessert

ggessert@igc.org

The end of the world keeps getting more final. In the past the gods guaranteed a sequel, which is why medieval paintings of Judgement Day were jammed with people, as crowded as subway cars at rush hour. The message is clear: nobody really dies. Today most of us suspect otherwise: the end of the world may be absolute and irrevocable, with nothing resembling an afterlife, not even in works, ideas, or community.

This vision is less than 200 years old. In 1816 Lord Byron expressed it in his poem, 'Darkness,' in which the sun is extinguished. Humanity, at war with itself to the bitter end, dwindles and disappears. Darwin was not particularly concerned about the end of the world, but lent scientific credibility to the idea of human extinction, which for many people is the same thing. H. G. Wells confronted our extinction in The Time Machine (1895), and Olaf Stapledon explored it obsessively in Last and First Men (1930), in which humans go extinct in 18 different ways. Robinson Jeffers accepted our impermanence as a species, and used it to inform many of his poems. However, throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th, few writers had much to say on the subject. Except for those rare individuals who were gifted or burdened with a sense of geological time, human extinction was largely ignored until 1945. Hiroshima changed everything, including the future. Since World War II, artists, writers, and movie-makers have energetically explored our end.

When a story successfully engages mind-numbing but intractable possibilities, we seek its recounting and variations on its themes. Movies like Little Shop of Horrors, Dr. Strangelove, and Invasion of the Body Snatcherstouch some of our deepest fears, but in entirely unthreatening ways, as schlock, farce, or science fiction. Whether dealing with mad scientists, political cowboys, or complacency in the face of hungry extraterrestrials, end-of-the-world stories are sermons that invite astonishment and laughter even as they chastise us for betraying life. Maybe we deserve to go extinct. Maybe we want to. We are our own worst enemies, which is why so many end-of-the-world stories invite us to imagine the wounds of civilization healed. With cities in ruins and the human population approaching zero, we can start over.

Aesthetically, disease is the most appealing instrument of destruction. Unlike nuclear war, extraterrestrials, or grey goo (a nanotech apocalypse in which everything on earth is reduced to identical copies of infinitesimally small self-replicating machines), a final epidemic can leave the biosphere intact, along with plenty of loot for survivors. The epidemic is invariably swift, which spares readers too much distressing imagery. Two of the finest novels of human extinction, Gore Vidal's Kalki(1978) and Kurt Vonnegut's Galapagos (1985) feature terminal epidemics. Now Margaret Atwood updates the story of disease-induced human extinction for the first decade of the 21st century.

Oryx and Crake is set in a near-future that is like today, only more so. Gigantic corporations with names like OrganInc, HelthWyzer, and RejoovenEsence rule earth. Society is divided into haves and have-nots. The haves, who work for or run the corporations, live in gated compounds with good shopping. The have-nots live in the plebelands, vast crime-ridden slums. Jimmy and Crake meet in high school in the HelthWyzer compound, where their parents work. Both boys are loners. Jimmy cultivates a jaundiced view of the world and thinks about sex. Crake, whose father died a few years before, an apparent suicide, is remote and academically gifted. The boys play computer games together, favoring ones that involve extinction lore, historical battles, or world conquest. They surf the net and discover sites dedicated to open heart surgeries, executions, animal torture, and pornography. On a site called HottTotts, which features child sex in impoverished countries, they first see Oryx, an exquisitely beautiful child prostitute from somewhere in Southeast Asia. Both boys immediately fall for her?but each keeps his secret from the other.

After high school Jimmy goes on to art school in New York. Except for genetic art, which does not interest him, the arts are irrelevant, but there is still need for advertising, so Jimmy unenthusiastically prepares himself for a career in what he calls '2-D windowdressing,' public relations. Crake, on the other hand, is courted by the best schools in the country, and eventually chooses Watson-Crick, a prestigious institute of science. There he focuses on transgenics. Eventually he becomes a leading biotechnologist, and climbs high on the corporate ladder. Along the way he learns that HelthWyzer has programs not only to cure disease but to create it. This assures profits into the indefinite future. In the world of Atwood's novel, all rebellion ends in futility or death, so rebellion is not an option for either Jimmy or Crake. Absence of choice fuels fantasies of world-destruction and post-human worlds.

World-destruction fantasies are common but few people act on them. Fewer still are in positions to perpetrate anything beyond symbolic acts of sabotage or terrorism. Crake has expertise and access to vast resources. With his ruinous family history and blighted sex life he experiences little in humanity worth preserving. By the time he achieves his dream of being with Oryx, the fate of humanity is sealed.

Atwood's characters brood in passing about transgression, but for her, the central problem with biotechnology is not that it goes too far. The central problem is that it can realize human dreams. If biotechnology were only a matter of improving health and looks, feeding the hungry, making a few people rich, and tooling new pets, most people would welcome what they found useful and resign themselves to the rest. However, biotechnology can serve dreams that rise out of the infantile and mineral depths, dreams to radically improve the race, or avenge stolen lives, dreams for an emptied world, and for the ecstasy of destruction. Atwood reminds us that the greatest danger from biotechnology today is not from cloning, germline engineering, or corporate domination of the world's food supply, dangerous as these things may be, but from engineered disease. And from what we already are.

The novel has a few shortcomings. For two so tormented characters, Jimmy and Crake are surprisingly unadventurous in conversation with one another. True, their situations in life are extraordinary, and all genuinely extraordinary experience tends to maroon people within the confines of ordinary language. Yet we would expect Jimmy especially to explore the possibilities of language, since he is fascinated by words. Instead, Jimmy and Crake sound like two guys with a few family problems and the kinds of routine grudges against the system that prepare them to be functionaries. Still, Jimmy and Crake's conversations are compelling. She captures the adolescent cynicism so popular today (and not limited to adolescents), a style of disbelief that mimics the cynicism of worldly power without fathoming its implications.

The world that Atwood sketches, mostly through Jimmy, is demonic, yet not without beauty or tenderness. The boys' naive cynicism puts them on a collision course with the world, and affords Crake no defense against his own fury and power. Crake is an exceptionally drawn character, driven by unrelenting betrayals from the people most important to him. As a boy, he responds by immersing himself in study and computers. Later he explores socially sanctioned crime. Finally he rises to all-encompassing revenge. Even as he pursues highly structured madness he never ceases to be human. Jimmy and Oryx, both of whom display grievous shortcomings as human beings, especially in their treatment of Crake, are never altogether unlovable characters. Should we go extinct? Become posthuman? No contemporary novel reminds us with such absence of sentimentality of what is at stake.

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