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Oryx and Crake | Margaret Atwood, 2003

What is it about?

A post-apocalyptic outcome to toxic 21st century obsessions with perfection and containment, more or less, replete with tuberous, bioengineered brainless ChickieNobs and sealed-off compounds for the upper classes, protected by shady squadrons of corporate police. Oh and there is some love triangle also. You can buy this very worthwhile book here.

Why this book?

Because tiny dog loves Margaret Atwood, and tiny dog loves depressing post-apocalyptic catastrophe narratives where masses of desperate people are felled by airborn contagions, nuclear winters, and the like.

The dreaded ChickieNob
An illustration by Nup

The Nup has provided us with a truly scary illustration of the following scene of the book:

Excerpt from Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood:

What they were looking at was a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing.

"What the hell is it?" said Jimmy.

"Those are chickens," said Crake. "Chicken parts. Just the breasts, on this one. They've got ones that specialize in drumsticks too, twelve to a growth unit."

nup
april 27 2k4

I thought the book was a good and interesting read. The pacing starts out a little slow (as previously mentioned) but picks up after Snowman decides to get out of his tree and go do stuff. (tiny-dog: seriously snowman get a clupes) Snowman/Jimmy seems an unlikely hero and as we find out, that is basically true. In a system that values scientific prowess above all else, those with artistic abilities are marginalized. So Jimmy is a fish out of water in this scientific world of the compounds. But even in this, he is obviously privileged as he is living within the compound system and not out the pleeblands. It is because of his friendship with Crake that he gets the dubious honor of being the last man standing (well not really, but close enough).

There are lots of things/subjects that can be discussed in this book and I am just picking here and there. Oryx. From what I can glean from the book’s website, she is a composite character created from actual headlines about child slaves and internet child pornography. Now, I think she was trying to be shocking with her initial description of Oryx (I won’t even mention what it was, but assume that it is a very disturbing image with three 8 year old girls and a grown man). Oryx’s own indifference to her past and its atrocities make it seem as if Margaret Atwood is forcing the reader to be outraged for her. (tiny-dog:Hmm that is an interesting point, I hadn't thought of it like that.) At least I have to assume that is the reason.

One character that I thought was developed with interesting potential but just kind of evaporates is Jimmy’s mom. I really felt like she was being set up to be pivotal in the climax of the book, but then we learn she was
killed. Even then, it set up the possibility that this had been fabricated to get information from Jimmy leading me to believe she was still going to reenter the story. As tiny-dog pointed out, Margaret Atwood probably has very specific reasons for minimizing the female characters in the story to make a point (though in this case I can’t see what that would be). (tiny-dog: I totally thought this too. What in hell was the point of having her rebellion be a key theme early on, then having her escape, only to have her randomly killed years later without any details? If M.A. was making some kind of point with this I was too dense to get it.)

Oryx and Crake II? Does anyone else (tiny-dog?) think the ending felt a bit abrupt and open ended? In end of the world books, one of the interesting things in the genre is the interaction between survivors. When the other survivors are discovered towards the end of the book, I was curious to hear how they had survived and what their story was, but then the book just ends with Snowman spying on them from the bushes and looking at his nonfunctioning watch and saying “zero hour” time to go… what the hell does that mean? Did he die? Did he go back to his tree and pee on some crickets? I have to admit, the ending left me hanging a little more than I was hoping. But I was thinking that perhaps Margaret Atwood had in the back of her mind: sequel. Certainly it would make an interesting book to see how the work would develop with the genetically altered Crakers and the surviving humans. With the Crakers having a shorter maturation period, certainly they have the growing population advantage. But they seem so docile that I am sure that remaining humans would take advantage of that fact (Snowman had to some extent already). Anyway, if there isn’t a sequel, I would have liked just a few more pages on the other survivors. (tiny-dog: It seemed set up for a sequel to me, and I would read one, but she has never written a sequel before, "literary" writers usually don't write them but that's not to say that she might?? A lot of books have really unsatisfying endings and so in that refard I wasn't *too* surprised by this one although I didn't like it very much. I actually thought the scenes where the world actually ended were very rushed through compared to the long meditative chapters on Snowman peeing on crickets and dreaming of porn in his tree, and so in keeping with the pacing problems we've both discussed, this ending is kind of another one of those problems.)

tiny-dog
april 22, 2004

All right, I actually finished this one. I am serious. And it only took me four or five days, and so this tells you that I really liked it.

Nup and I agree, the book lingers for a rather long spell on the opening scenario of the character Snowman (known as Jimmy before the apocalypse) hanging out in a tree, covered in scabs and mooning over the paucity of alchohol in a world depopulated by bioterrorism. From his tree he has a series of hallucinations about his past life that give us some clue of what happened before the s*** went down, which is all actually explained via flashbacks in the second (and faster-paced) half of the book.

Synopsis aside, what I really enjoyed about this book was the way Margaret Atwood took realistic details from the present time, our increasing friendliness toward bioengineered food sources, medically enhanced physical perfectionism, numbing obsession with violent and pornographic forms of entertainment, and took it to a next potential step: a demented world of ever-readjusted expectations about whats beneficial for mankind, resulting in disaster.

I'm kind of on board with acknowledging how gross we are, the human race, all of our sick ass experiments and lusts for creepy things, and so it's entertaining to see an author with real writing chops (take note, basically all male sci fi writers turning a buck on these kinds of scenarios with their sexist, characterless writing) take this subject on with all of her wit and imagination (for example, the ChickiNob, a "protein animal tuber" consisting of twelve chicken breasts attached to a fleshy stalk, with no brain or beak). If most sci fi was written by better writers, it wouldnt need to exist in its own sweaty little geek category.

Anyway I have plenty of criticisms as well that I'll get into in a minute here but overal, great book. Nupper is up next.

Transcript of a chat about it in which tiny dog has a feminist meltdown:

Nup: yeah, the first half of the book was mostly fluff. i think it could have been cut down to about maybe 75 pages or so...

tiny-dog: I wouldnt go that far but I think she could have traded some of the tree hallucinations for more stuff about Oryx, who got the short end of the stick

Nup: yeah, she was more of a 2d character.

tiny-dog: It was like M.A. was trying to make this a very male book-- I would have guessed it was written by a man if I didnt know. She is often attacked as being a feminist writer since she writes about women here and there so I think this is one of her deliberate attempts to throw off that criticism (which, as criticism, shows you how sexist the world really is) Male point of view = normal. Female point of view = weird feminist book for women.

Nup: yeah, i didn't really think about that while I was reading, but in hindsight, you are exactly right. it does have the feel as having been written by a male author.
.
tiny-dog: Like, Oryx is really sexualized and wispy the way men usually write about women...physically perfect, most important thing about her is sex, etc

Nup: i found the whole description of her on the website as a little girl very disturbing. perhaps margaret was making a point with that, but still, disturbing that she would want to depict that.

tiny-dog: Yes I think she was making a point for sure about women and subjugation and that kind of thing. But she didn't counter it with humanizing Oryx or making her multi dimensional. She basically died still being a sex object and pretty much liking it. An interesting choice-- if a man wrote that I would just chalk it up to a certain unreliable world view on the part of the author (author subconsciously sexualizes and subjugates women and doesnt really realize it-- thinks its normal) but for MA to do it was a choice, surely. Not sure what point she was trying to make.

What is it about?

Apparently it is about a former beauty queen slash actress, some trashy hollywood types, and other pop culture castaways nattering on about the fragmented and superficial pock-marked moonscape of modern America, insofar as I can tell.

Why this book?

Douglas Coupland writes novels in aggressively modern settings, dipping heavily into the pop cultural references kit bag to flesh out his sentences. We at book club would like to see what this plenty-selling author is doing with his latest mod material in, what is this, his sixth book? Since we have enjoyed some of his others (favorites of book club being, Life After God and Microserfs).

Nup
March 16, 2004

As we have discussed before, one inherent flaw to most Douglas Coupland books is his lack of distinct character voice. Like the scene in Being John Malchovich in which John Malchovich enters his own head and sees the world as populated with clones of himself, this book sort of seems to take place in a world of Dougs. While I definitely like what he has to say or his writing style, the lack of distinct voice does make it hard to believe that it is real people interacting. I think it did get a little better further on as I think Susan's mom really became a believable character in her vicarious living through her daughter and Susan's interaction with her made her a bit more defined.

The other thing about books about fake celebrities is that you have no context by which to gague their intended popularity or fame quotient. while, i don't really care about that myself, i do think that in writing about celebrities it does play a role. and "Bell Aire PI"? that really does not quite sounds like it would be a blockbuster, but more of a spoof. anyway, on a second reading, i found these bits to be less jarring, but they still seemed kind of fake.

I really liked the character of Vanessa, but she came in way too late in the book and then, to have a separate chapter about her in school (even though i really liked that chapter) seemed a little out of place. Perhaps she was someone he intended to write a book about and lumped her in with this one.

Anyway, those are just a few blurbs to get the ball rolling. Curious to here what your thoughts are...

Tiny dog
March 27, 2004

Sorry for my delay on this one, I am far enough into it now to have some real comments.
Wow, my thoughts are pretty much exactly the same as yours, I wonder if I will change my mind at all as I get further into it. I found the first of the typos you mentioned-- I wish I could find it now, I should have marked it.

The first thing I noticed that really put me off was the random repetition early on in the book of one of the major themes of Life After God. The quote goes "you've pretty much felt all the emotions you're ever going to feel, and from here on its reruns." This same exact thing was the subject of a Life After God story, said this samw way also, it was like he lifted the idea straight out of that story and pasted it in here. Writing stories myself I know how tempting that is, but I would like to think you wouldn't do it with things that were already published. It distracted me a lot.

Also as you said about all characters being Doug, I agree this is especially bad in this book so far, all of the characters saying ironic things in the same exact style, with the same level of wit, "I was Jon Benet and a half," that kind of thing-- except its everyone talking like that. I think the point of Douglas Coupland books is for him to showcase clever turns of phrase, however, and so it would make sense to put them in the mouths of as many characters as possible. It doesn't make for versimilitude/realism though. Ok back to the book...

Conclusion

Note... tiny dog, despite renewing the book at the library once, and still posessing the grossly overdue copy at this time, was unable to limp past the first few chapters, for reasons more or less stated in my opening review, above. From what I read, it's a truly cynical, slap-dash book, all irony and no heart or effort. It was a total Douglas Coupland puppet show. It bored me silly and I had to proceed to the next book, Oryx and Crake, which we BOTH finished lest you give up on book club...

Recommendation:

I won't speak for Nup but Tiny dog says no way unless you like really boring, poorly written books full of self-congratulatory pop culture metaphors. If you're going to read Doug, skip this one and go for Microserfs, or Generation X.

Hey, peeps. Send mail to mail@tiny-dog.com.