Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake

Book Review of Oryx and Crake

“Oh, Snowman, what happened to Richard Nixon?”

“Shit! I mean, egad. He has offended Almighty Crake and His wrath was upon him. The spraygun is holy unto Crake and only Snowman could touch it. As Dick touched it, the Great Crake smote him unto death.”

“Oh, Snowman, tell us what we must do to please Almighty Crake.”

“Well, Abe, first off, get Snowman four fish daily, make that six. You must understand the more fish, the more it would please Crake. And hear this all Crakers. Never touch the spraygun or thou shall be struck dead like Dick.”

“But oh, Snowman, why this object and not others?”

“Thus spake Crake, Thou shall not touch the spraygun.”

“Oh, Snowman, how did this world came to be?”

“What? Well, Marie, in the beginning, there was Crake and He…”

Damn Crake, it all your fault. You created this mess and now I have to clean up your cesspool. I should’ve killed you earlier. I just want to eat my ChickieNob and drink my Happicuppa coffee. But no, you have to create a new heaven and a new earth.

“And where did Crake come from?”

“Shit!”

Snowman knows he will soon follow the footsteps of the dinosaurs and the Crakers will inherit the earth. He must leave them before he dies. And they would say he has rode a chariot of fire into the heavens where Crake dwells. They would venerate him as The Prophet and tell stories of how he slew the dragons, well, maybe just the wolvogs and pigoons.

                                             Margaret Atwood (Source: Vanwaffle at Wikimedia)

Oryx and Crake is Margaret Atwood’s apocalypse, a bioengineering nightmare of wolvogs and pigoons and rakunks and of viruses embedded in aphrodisiac pills. Crake engineered a new species, the Crakers, and eliminated humans with an eboli-type virus. After killing Crake to avenge the death of his beloved Oryx, Snowman became the guardian of the new species and must protect them against the genetically engineered beasts as well as from knowledge and wisdom. When he discovers three human survivors, he must decide whether to befriend them or eliminate them.

Emily Antles in the nonfiction Frankenstein’s Cat depicted the current advances in genetic engineering. Today, bioengineers have created balding mice, glow-in-the-dark cats and cows that give therapeutic milk and they could just as easily make wolvogs, pigoons and rakunks.

The novel’s premise supplies food for thought, and though the writing isn’t as compelling as that in The Handmaid’s Tale, it is a worthwhile read.

Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin

Iris Chase in her old age wants to let her alienated granddaughter know that the latter’s grandmother was actually Iris’s sister Laura. She tells the story of her unhappy marriage to Richard Griffen and his affair with Laura, who submitted to the man only to save Alex Thomas, a communist running from the authorities.

Iris publishes the novel The Blind Assassin, the affair between her and Alex, in Laura’s name, perhaps to compensate for Laura killing herself after learning of the affair. When we learn of Laura’s death in the beginning of the novel, we know it wasn’t an accident and suspect suicide. Midway through the novel, we may have suspected she killed herself because Richard had raped her, but the real reason was more powerful. Laura realized Iris and Alex had betrayed her.

The Blind Assassin is about the plight of women in an age when they were considered men’s possessions and their only goal was to satisfy them. There are plenty of novels and movies that tell of the suffering and dehumanization, but such a theme is worth telling and retelling.

When I read of how Iris married Richard Griffen hoping the businessman would save her father’s business and how she continued to submit to him even after she found out he had cheated her father and caused him to commit suicide, I wished she had the courage and strength to free herself from his grasp. I wished she Laura rebelling against the forces that repressed her. But she is Iris and not Laura. And she rebelled in the only way she knew, by having a secret affair with Alex Thomas and living a double life.

Margaret Atwood (Source: Vanwaffle at Wikimedia)

The Blind Assassin is a tragic tale and the greatest tragedy is Laura committing suicide after learning of the affair between Iris and Alex.

The tale-within-a-tale that Iris wrote and attributed to Laura misleads the readers to believe that Laura had the affair with Alex. What strikes me is the quality of writing between the main narrative and Iris’s novel, the former demonstrating Atwood’s skills and the latter Iris’s lack of. Perhaps Margaret Atwood wants to show Iris’s hollow life through the writing. The lovers in Iris’s novel come across as aloof and flat and they seemed out of the reader’s reach.

Though both Iris and Laura suffered and sacrificed, I like the latter more perhaps because she fought harder against overwhelming odds.

Book Review of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale

Handmaids are the vehicles of reproduction in the Republic of Gilead, where radiation from sabotaged nuclear power plants had reduced the birthrate and mutated three in four fetuses. The Angles root out threats to the theocracy—nuns, scientists, scholars, etc—by hanging them on the wall of Harvard Yard and displaying the hooded figures to the public. The bastion of freethinking has turned into an exhibit of tyranny. Instead of using Newspeak as in Orwell’s 1984, the leaders here deny the people education. But the idea is the same: without the ability to think and analyze and critique, the masses would only react to threats and occasionally rewards. Pavlovian conditioning.

Margaret Atwood (Photo by Vanwaffle)

The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian novel in the tradition of Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World. The means of control may be different, but the goal is the same. A subservient mass that would accept the social norm and cultural values, whether they be good or bad, without questioning their validity and without recognizing their assumptions and biases.

Margaret Atwood wrote the novel in the shadow of the religious fanaticism in Iran and Afghanistan, but she dedicated it to Mary Webster, an ancestor on her mother’s side who was tried for being a witch in Puritan Massachusetts, but survived the hanging. She understood that such a nightmare could happen anywhere in any century.