Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

I’d never read any Margaret Atwood before choosing Oryx and Crake for book club. I listened to the audio version, narrated by Campbell Scott. Wow, Atwood is a great writer. But this is one disturbing book.

The book is narrated by Snowman, who seems to be the last remaining original human on earth. There is a new race of genetically engineered people, but they have very little in common with Snowman. Society has collapsed. Cities are in ruins. Over the course of the book, Snowman talks about his present life - sleeping in trees to avoid being eaten by genetically engineered monsters, scrounging for food, water, and supplies, answering questions from the perfect children of the other race - while also telling us about his childhood, about his relationships with his best friend Crake and his one great love Oryx, and what happened to bring the planet to its present state. (Bonus points from me for multiple references to Alex the African Grey Parrot.)

The narrative grabbed me from the third paragraph on page 1: “Out of habit he looks at his watch – stainless-steel case, burnished aluminum band, still shiny although it no longer works. He wears it now as his only talisman. A blank face is what it shows him: zero hour. It causes a jolt of terror to run through him, this absence of official time. Nobody nowhere knows what time it is.”

Published in 2003, Oryx and Crake came out before the current round of dystopian novels. And unlike many of them, we don’t have a hopeful subplot to distract us from the grim reality of what our future as a species could hold if we go down a certain path of genetic engineering. There are relationships, including romantic and sexual relationships, but the unrelenting narrative about how the world was destroyed is not much lightened by those relationships.

Gated compounds and economic divides. Genetic engineering. Too powerful corporations. Every depravity imaginable available on the internet. Climate change. Of all the dystopian novels I've read over the years (at least 20 in the last four years according to my Goodreads list), this is the scariest because it feels the most possible.

The book is filled with statements and passages that made me stop and think, like this one: “Watch out for the leaders, Crake used to say. First the leaders and the led, then the tyrants and the slaves, then the massacres. That’s how it’s always gone.” (p. 155)

At this point I am not sure whether or not I will read the sequels - not because the first isn't good, it is – but because the series depicts such a depressing future. At the very least I'll need a little break first and something lighthearted to read before tackling The Year of the Flood.

If you enjoy beautifully written realistic dystopian fiction that carries true warnings for our species, Oryx and Crake is for you. The Galesburg Public Library has the three books in the series in both print and ebook versions.

The Fire Sermon by Francesca Haig

The Fire Sermon by Francesca Haig is a dystopian novel set several hundred years after “the blast,” a nuclear war that ruined the world. “Before the blast, they say there’d been sermons about fire, about the end of the world. The fire itself gave the last sermon; after that there were no more.” (p. 13 of the advance reader copy)

At first, there were few surviving babies. Three or four generations after the blast, twins began to appear. One perfect baby and one imperfect, mutated baby. One Alpha baby and one Omega baby. At first, some tried to kill the imperfect baby only to discover a chilling truth – when one twin died, the other died. Now society is divided into the Alphas and the Omegas. As soon as it is clear which baby is the deformed one, he or she is cast off into an Omega village, to struggle to survive on the worst land with the least resources. The Alphas know they can’t kill their Omega twins, but they make life harsh for them.

Every now and then, an Omega baby’s deformity is manifested as the ability to glimpse the future. The narrator, the unoriginally named Cassandra, is one of these seers, otherwise normal.

Most twins don’t stay together long enough to form a bond, but since it is not clear at first which child is the Omega child when a seer is born, twins with a seer stay together longer. Cass and her twin Zach lived together with their parents until they were 13, when Cass was forced to leave home. Zach has joined the Alpha government, determined to make a name for himself and change society. The book opens with Cass being taken from her home and thrown in a cell. Powerful Alphas often “protect” their twins in some manner, so the Alphas can’t be assassinated through the murder of their twins.

The book starts very slowly. The world building is gradual. The author does not dump all the information on the reader at once. However, once Cass meets up with a mysterious one-armed prisoner who has no memory of his past, escapes, and goes on the run with him, the book really takes off. I was pulled right into the story after that. It was refreshing to have an adult narrator (in her twenties) instead of a teenager for once.

Some of the plot specifics are hard to believe or clichéd. Cass loudly breaks a glass case with a wrench while trying to escape her prison. She and Kip, the amnesiac, come across a party in a barn at an Omega settlement and dance freely in the shadows despite the danger. When Kip reveals something Cass wants to keep secret, she goes on a rampage, throwing breakable objects at the door. There is a love triangle that feels forced (are women authors even allowed to publish stories without love triangles anymore?).

But it’s an engaging story despite these occasional lapses. Although dystopian plots have been done often, this one manages to find some original ideas to include. The book ends with two big surprises, one I anticipated and one I did not.

There are some lovely passages. For example, “There were no written tales or pictures of the blast. What was the point of writing it, or drawing it, when it was etched on every surface? Even now, more than four hundred years after it had destroyed everything, it was still visible in every tumbled cliff, scorched plain, and ash-clogged river. Every face. It had become the only story the earth could tell, so who else would record it?” (p. 13 of the advance reader copy) The Omega children are all sterile; Cass wonders, “Was that the one thing Omegas are spared? Since we can’t have children, at least we’d never have to experience sending a child away.” (p. 25 of the ARC)

I feel the author missed an opportunity to make the reader think about the economic disparities of our own society. Perhaps the sequel will get be a little meatier. I definitely plan to read the sequel, and I recommend The Fire Sermon for those who enjoy dystopian fiction and strong female leads. The book is scheduled to be published in March 2015. I read an advance reader copy from netgalley.com.