NOVELIST CONJURES FUTURISTIC NIGHTMARE FROM TODAY’S HEADLINES

Book Review

Margaret Atwood takes care to construct her futuristic nightmares out of current materials. Nearly two decades ago, in The Handmaid’s Tale, the 63-year-old Ottawa-born poet and novelist posited an unholy alliance between puritan feminism and Bible-belt fundamentalism, from which she brewed a horrible and bizarre form of social engineering. Oryx and Crake is that book’s companion piece-there are many detailed echoes-but the ingredients are genetic engineering, climatic catastrophe, and global pandemic. The scary thing is that this latest book seems less contrived, less invented than the first. Ever heard that the protein in spider’s silk can be harvested from goat’s milk to make bulletproof vests? Atwood didn’t make it up.

The narrator in Oryx and Crake is Jimmy, hungry and up a tree, to avoid the wolvogs-genetically spliced creatures, as waggy as dogs and vicious as wolves. The landscape is hot and littered with detritus from the city that now stands some way out to sea: “Things happened, I had no idea, it was out of my controlÉlisten to me please!” Once there were the “pleeblands” where “neurotypicals” lived. “Genius gene” people lived in fortified genetic-science compounds named HelthWyzer, RejoovenEsence, or AnooYoo, all developing immortality products.

Jimmy, though compound-born and bred, scored high on words, but low on numbers. Only the scruffy Martha Graham Academy, a once-rich performing-arts college, would have him. Now it offered courses in things like “Webgame Dynamics;” in sophomore “VizArts,” Jimmy had done The Maltese Falcon with costumes by Kate Greenaway and “depth-and-shadow styling by Rembrandt.”

Meanwhile, Jimmy’s “genius gene” school friend, Crake, has been snapped up by the Watson-Crick Institute (like Harvard “back before it got drowned”), where students are given half royalties in anything they invent. Chickens, for example, that produce only drumsticks-“twelve to a growth unit;” or “Rockulators,” plastic and plant “combo-matrix” rocks for lawn regulation, absorbing and releasing water according to the ambient humidity. For drinking water there’s the Moses model: “Just Hit It With A Rod.”

Crake’s beautiful, enigmatic girlfriend, Oryx, was first glimpsed by the two friends when they were teenagers, surfing the porno sites. When she turns up they both fall in love with her, but for all the grittiness of her story she retains a virtual quality, like a piece of graphics. But then what is real here? Crake’s secret “Paradice Project” is the creation of a perfect race: peaceable, vegetarian, and cellulite-free. Reality intervenes when he slips a “hostile bioform” into the pleeblands-to keep the pharmaceutical companies happy. “For maximum profit,” says Crake, “the patient should either get well or die just before his or her money runs out. It’s a fine calculation.” Accidentally, the bioform wipes everyone out, except for Jimmy, Crake’s humanoid tribe, and the animals.

All of this is done on a roll of dry, black, parodic laughter. Atwood loves lingo, the shrunken language of advertising, brand names, slogans, corporate-speak, Web talk-above all the heartless language of scientific reductionism. Jimmy himself is a closet romantic, hoarding old expressive words, but he has to fight hard against all this knowingness. Post-catastrophe, he finds it hard to remember any language.

One of Atwood’s themes in Oryx and Crake, as in The Handmaid’s Tale, is the fragility of memory, and therefore of civilization. Break the generational link, and soon no one will remember how it was. But this time she has a twist. Crake’s Paradice people are blanks, outside history. If Crake had had his way, they would never have developed one.

Every destructive impulse has been screened out: competitiveness, territoriality, hierarchy-even sex, beyond seasonal reproductive periods. They are the beautiful and the bland. And yet, when Jimmy makes a scavenging journey to Crake’s old compound, they worry. They make an effigy of him to magic him back. And Jimmy remembers Crake’s words: “Watch out for art. As soon as they start doing art we’re in trouble.” Art breeds idols, funerals, the afterlife, sin, kings, slavery, and war. So it comes round. Even from a standing start, the wheel will grind itself into motion again.

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“Biting at the Future,” The Economist, May 3, 2003.