Oryx and Crake
Jul. 24th, 2003 06:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
triskellianI'm going to start writing about each book I read, partly because it's good practice, and partly cos I'm fed up of only using this LJ to whine about work ;-)
So here's the first:
I've finished Oryx and Crake. The subject matter is very different from all of Atwood's books I've read previously, and the protagonist - Snowman - is male, which is pretty much unheard of. The narrative structure is a continuation of something she's done in her last few, two parallel strands of story: the present, and the life leading up to the present, as remembered by Snowman. Oryx and Crake are, respectively, Snowman's lover and his best friend, both dead by the time of the book's 'present'. They are the only people who seem to have had any solidity in his life.
It's the first time I remember noticing her particular style of writing (in the 'I'd recognise it if her name wasn't on the cover' way). Or maybe I notice that in every book, and have just forgotten it by the time I read the next. I had a half-intention to try to define what it is that makes her writing distinctive, but always forgot to follow through on it when I was actually reading. This, I suppose, is a good sign for the story.
So, what did I think? I enjoyed it. It took me a while to get into, although part of that is probably that it's such a different book from everything else she's written.
It's both a utopia and a dystopia. The world Snowman has lived in, told through his flashbacks, is ours gone horribly wrong. It's full of scary images of genetic modifications - the snat, the rakunk, the wolvog and the pigoon (which I keep reading as 'pigeon', but never mind), deep divides between the privileged and the poor, liberty curtailed and conformity enforced. The terrible fate of the rest of humanity has been hinted at throughout the book, but at the end we see it play out through Snowman's memory, as he returns to the scene of the destruction of humanity. We see the global epidemic break out, the chaos as people panic, and Snowman shutting himself in to wait out the carnage.
The utopia - the novel's present - features Snowman as an observer, a leftover from an unimaginable past. The Children of Crake, a completely new type of human, have been designed to survive in the post-apocalypse world that Crake has left for them, and designed without the destructive urges of homo sapiens.
This is science fiction, by almost any criteria you care to name, but it won't be categorised as such. I was discussing book categorisation with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
secretrebel the other day, and Margaret Atwood is a point of difficulty. The Handmaid's Tale is science fiction, The Blind Assassin contains science fiction, and now Oryx and Crake is science fiction, too, but no one would call Atwood a science fiction author, or even, I expect, say that she 'also writes science fiction', as they would of Iain (M) Banks. She's categorised as writing 'contemporary fiction' or 'literature' or somesuch label, and the two don't seem to be able to cross over for her. I'm trying to think of another author who writes both mainstream and genre fiction, without using a different name, to compare how they're treated, but I'm drawing a blank so far.
The book I'm now reading is Trumpet by Jackie Kay, which I'll write about more when I've finished. It's one of the books I'll be studying next term, the one I'm most looking forward to, which is why I'm reading it first. It tells of the aftermath of the death of a great jazz musician who is revealed in death to be a woman, a fact which comes as a surprise to everyone except his/her (trouble with pronouns again ;-) wife. I'm finding proof-reading errors in it, which annoys me. 'Here' for 'hear', plurals with apostrophes. Grr.
So here's the first:
I've finished Oryx and Crake. The subject matter is very different from all of Atwood's books I've read previously, and the protagonist - Snowman - is male, which is pretty much unheard of. The narrative structure is a continuation of something she's done in her last few, two parallel strands of story: the present, and the life leading up to the present, as remembered by Snowman. Oryx and Crake are, respectively, Snowman's lover and his best friend, both dead by the time of the book's 'present'. They are the only people who seem to have had any solidity in his life.
It's the first time I remember noticing her particular style of writing (in the 'I'd recognise it if her name wasn't on the cover' way). Or maybe I notice that in every book, and have just forgotten it by the time I read the next. I had a half-intention to try to define what it is that makes her writing distinctive, but always forgot to follow through on it when I was actually reading. This, I suppose, is a good sign for the story.
So, what did I think? I enjoyed it. It took me a while to get into, although part of that is probably that it's such a different book from everything else she's written.
It's both a utopia and a dystopia. The world Snowman has lived in, told through his flashbacks, is ours gone horribly wrong. It's full of scary images of genetic modifications - the snat, the rakunk, the wolvog and the pigoon (which I keep reading as 'pigeon', but never mind), deep divides between the privileged and the poor, liberty curtailed and conformity enforced. The terrible fate of the rest of humanity has been hinted at throughout the book, but at the end we see it play out through Snowman's memory, as he returns to the scene of the destruction of humanity. We see the global epidemic break out, the chaos as people panic, and Snowman shutting himself in to wait out the carnage.
The utopia - the novel's present - features Snowman as an observer, a leftover from an unimaginable past. The Children of Crake, a completely new type of human, have been designed to survive in the post-apocalypse world that Crake has left for them, and designed without the destructive urges of homo sapiens.
This is science fiction, by almost any criteria you care to name, but it won't be categorised as such. I was discussing book categorisation with
secretrebel the other day, and Margaret Atwood is a point of difficulty. The Handmaid's Tale is science fiction, The Blind Assassin contains science fiction, and now Oryx and Crake is science fiction, too, but no one would call Atwood a science fiction author, or even, I expect, say that she 'also writes science fiction', as they would of Iain (M) Banks. She's categorised as writing 'contemporary fiction' or 'literature' or somesuch label, and the two don't seem to be able to cross over for her. I'm trying to think of another author who writes both mainstream and genre fiction, without using a different name, to compare how they're treated, but I'm drawing a blank so far.The book I'm now reading is Trumpet by Jackie Kay, which I'll write about more when I've finished. It's one of the books I'll be studying next term, the one I'm most looking forward to, which is why I'm reading it first. It tells of the aftermath of the death of a great jazz musician who is revealed in death to be a woman, a fact which comes as a surprise to everyone except his/her (trouble with pronouns again ;-) wife. I'm finding proof-reading errors in it, which annoys me. 'Here' for 'hear', plurals with apostrophes. Grr.
