I’m not sure what compelled me to listen to Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, which I ended up enjoying enough to then download the second book in The Madd Addam Trilogy. I’ve never been drawn to science fiction or fantasy. Even as a child, I preferred The Little House books over The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.
I honestly don’t know what has drawn me suddenly to this particular dystopian, speculative fiction. I worry a little that it is because dystopia is so close to reality that it no longer seems quite so sci-fi-y. As Snowman says in Oryx and Crake, “He doesn’t know which is worse, a past he can’t regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. Then there’s the future. Sheer vertigo.”
And of course, there is the fact, that it is Margaret Atwood telling the story. Certain authors have been constants throughout my adult life—Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, Mary Oliver, Toni Morrison. They bring me comfort, apparently even when they are writing about the world going to pieces.
What did I love about this book? I loved that we got to see the before and the after of the world as we know it through a guy named Jimmy who didn’t get into the best colleges. I love that Jimmy named himself for this new world The Abominable Snowman as an act of rebellion against his friend Crake, who banned names of magical creatures and who is largely responsible for Snowman’s predicament. And Snowman (by the time the story starts, he has dropped the modifier) is quite aware that a snowman is both playful and vulnerable and never self-made. I loved that even though the book was about some of the ugliest things in our culture, it is also about friendship and love and loss; and it is about things that are not lost, even when we humans really screw up. As Snowman says, “After everything that’s happened, how can the world still be so beautiful? Because it is.”
Laura Stavoe