Oryx and Crake, (Parts 8-11)

Now we get some real momentum going in the “real time” story as we continue to be given glimpses into the characters’ pasts.  Jimmy gets into a rather lowbrow college, with the help of some string-pulling by his father.  Crake is given red carpet treatment at one the most prestigious universities around, Watson-Crick.  The two friends continue to keep in touch with occasional get-togethers, during one of which Jimmy’s mother is seen in a TV clip as a member of a subversive group.  Jimmy is pulled aside for questioning from time to time throughout his college days by what amounts to a secret police group, and questioned at length in a search for anything he might know about his mother.  At one of these sessions, he gives away the fact that one of the women in the video clips they show him is, in fact, his mother.  We don’t know yet where this is leading, but the ominousness of it is intriguing. 

In “real time” his journey on foot takes him back to a scene from his past, the RejoovenEsence Compound.  A huge shining dome seen in the distance from this compound is identified as Crake’s base of operations, though what that means, exactly, has yet to be entirely disclosed.  An earlier scene presents Crake letting on to Jimmy that his father had somehow been in trouble with authorities over knowing something he shouldn’t know about their clandestine schemes, and that he was even assassinated, with the assassination made to look like an accident. 

Jimmy’s journey turns out to be more perilous than he had bargained for, as the Compound is now overrun by genetically altered wildlife, particularly the “pigoons” about which much of the earlier events revolved.  Apparently the experiments in implanting parts of the human brain into these creatures have been partly successful, because they now pull off a rather organized plan to catch Jimmy, which almost works, followed by cornering Jimmy in a building of the compound and proceeding to outwait him.  All this sounds very science-fictionesque in retrospect, but seems very real and believable in the reading. 

Our hero has really been something of an anti-hero all along, with numerous weaknesses, character flaws and the tendency to make mistakes by not thinking clearly.  We still don’t know how he managed to escape the disaster that killed off almost all of humanity; possibly a head’s-up from Crake, or some kind of antidote to what appears to be a runaway genetic disease.  We know there was a great Panic in which everybody fled, many dying as they ran.  Shades of Stephen King’s The Stand.  We get several references to a victim’s flesh foaming up as they perish, along with hints that Crake has had something to do with the causes.

 

Margaret Atwood’s other novels present a very broad array of genres, crossing from one to another with grace.  The Handmaid’s Tale is science fiction, or more accurately speculative fiction, but it doesn’t venture as far into “otherness” as this novel does.  Novels like Catseye and The Blind Assassin, while displaying some real cutting edge fictional concepts, don’t speculate wildly about the future as these do.  All in all, her status as a writer isn’t generally perceived as a “science fiction writer” per se; but she does it as well as anybody – and I say that as a reader who has explored the genre very deeply in the past.  Anyone who has seen the movie I Am Legend, starring Will Smith, will see definite similarities in this book, especially in the scenes depicting the desolation of Civilization’s collapse.  The conclusion of this book promises to be very rewarding!



Next week: Conclusion.



August’s book of the month: "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim," by David Sedaris. This author has become recognized as one of the great satire/humor writers of our time. “Sedaris has a satirical brazenness that holds up next to Twain and Nathaniel West.” – The New Yorker. “David Sedaris’s brilliance resides in a capacity to surprise, associate and dissociate, and the result is something like watching lightning strike in slow motion…One of the most shameless, acid, vaulting wits on planet earth.” – Boston Book Review. “You’ll just have to read it to find out what’s in it!” – Nancy Pelosi. [I made up that last one.]