Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood

   2004; 434 pages.  Book 1 (out of 3) in the “MaddAddam” trilogy.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Post-Apocalyptic Fiction; Genetic Engineering Sci-Fi.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

 

    In a post-apocalyptic wasteland, Snowman, once known as Jimmy, ekes out a solitary existence.  As far as he knows, he’s the last living human being on Earth.  The only one with immunity to the Plague.

 

    I guess you could count the genetically modified “Children of Crake” as fellow human survivors.  Unfortunately, thanks to their designer, Crake, they have a built-in, self-destruct trait in them.  At age 30, they drop over dead.  Immediately.  Automatically.

 

    Ah yes, Crake.  Snowman’s best friend.  A genius at just about everything.  And Oryx.  Such a sweet young lass, although worldly-wise since childhood.  She loved both Snowman and Crake, and was loved by both of them in return.  Crake and Oryx are gone now, both of them.

 

    Snowman can’t go on living like this.  The pigoons and wolvogs are becoming intelligent predators, and sooner or later they’ll catch Snowman, rip him to shreds, and eat him for lunch.  It’s time for Snowman to start planning a trip.

 

What’s To Like...

    Oryx and Crake is the first book in Margaret Atwood’s “MaddAddam” post-apocalyptic trilogy.  The title could be expanded to “Oryx and Crake and Snowman”, since the latter is whom we primarily follow in the book.

 

    For the most part, the storyline jumps between the present-day “post-” and the past “pre-" apocalypse”.  You can tell which time period you’re in by whether our protagonist goes by “Snowman” or “Jimmy”.

    The disaster scenario reminded me of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.  But here the steps leading up the civilization-ending plague are gradually revealed via Snowman’s flashbacks.

 

    The world-building is complex and thought-provoking.  Global warming has wreaked havoc on our planet.  God’s Gardeners remind everybody that the End is near for humanity.  BlyssPlus pills keep everyone happy, but at a deadly cost.  And the working class is forced to live in company compounds which means the corporations control every aspect of their lives.

 

    Genetic-tinkering has a major impact on the coming catastrophe.  It’s original aim is well-intended: grow your own replacement organs.  But it rapidly goes awry.  We’re now up to our ears in pigoons, wolvogs, snats, rakunks, bobkittens, spoats, giders, hemorrhagics, Crakers, and kanga-lambs; all carving out their niche in the creature pecking order. 

 

    There are some interesting characters to meet and greet, including Uncle En the child pimp, Jimmy’s wayward mom Sharon, and Jimmy’s crazier-than-a-loon dorm mate, Bernice.  The character development of both the primary and secondary persons is excellent.

 

    The ending is hopeful, terrifying, sad, and terrifying all at the same time.  Things stop at a logical place, as the present and past timelines of Jimmy/Snowman finally merge.  The how and why of the apocalyptic event are fully explained, and it is strongly hinted that the sequel holds a “first contact” scenario in store for Snowman.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.3*/5, based on 12,763 ratings and 1,568 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.01*/5, based on 269,400 ratings and 16,881 reviews.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Caecotrophs (n., pl.) : nutrient-rich fecal pellets.

Others: Gestalt (n.), Suttee (n.), Kakking (v.)

 

Excerpts...

    The rakunks had begun as an after-hours hobby on the part of one of the OrganInc biolab hotshots.  There’d been a lot of fooling around in those days: create-an-animal was so much fun, said the guys doing it; it made you feel like God.  A number of the experiments were destroyed because they were too dangerous to have around – who needed a cane toad with a prehensile tail like a chameleon’s that might climb in through the bathroom window and blind you while you were brushing your teeth?  Then there was the snat, an unfortunate blend of snake and rat: they’d had to get rid of those.  (pg. 57)

 

    “These are the floor models.  They represent the art of the possible.  We can list the individual features for prospective buyers, then we can customize.  Not everyone will want all the bells and whistles, we know that.  Though you’d be surprised how many people would like a very beautiful, smart baby that eats nothing but grass.  The vegans are highly interested in that little item.  We’ve done our market research.”

    Oh good, thought Jimmy.  Your baby can double as a lawn mower.  (pg. 359)

 

Kindle Details…

    Oryx and Crake sells for $12.99 right now at Amazon, as do the other two books in the series, The Year of The Flood and MaddAddam.  Margaret Atwood has more than a dozen other novels for you, ranging in price from $4.99 to $17.99, plus a couple of short stories for $0.99 apiece.

 

Is this purgatory, and if it is, why is it so much like the first grade?  (pg. 417)

    There’s a moderate amount of profanity in Oryx and Crake.  I noted 18 instances in the first 20% of the book, and later on, male genitalia are referenced.  There are various “sexual situations” presented, including ones involving minors.  None of them are lurid, but still, you probably don’t want little Timmy or Susie asking you what those passages are all about.

 

    I spotted two typos, both of which involved word splitting, which makes me think they occurred during the formatting stage in the e-book.  The funniest one of these was the phrase “antique roadshow” being split up into “anti queroadshow”.

 

    But I pick at nits.  Post-apocalyptic tales ought to have gritty and nasty parts, otherwise they wouldn’t be realistic.  Oryx and Crake fully met my high expectations for any novel penned by Margaret Atwood, and I have the other two books of the trilogy waiting for me on my Kindle.

 

    9 Stars.  One last teaser.  If you happen to be into role-playing games, Jimmy and Crake get hooked on a bunch of them here, including Blood & Roses, Barbarian Stomp, Three-Dimensional Waco, Kwiktime Osama, and my favorite (and theirs) Extinctathon.  Won’t somebody please develop and market real-world versions of these?

The Testaments - Margaret Atwood

    2019; 415 pages.  Book 2 (out of 2) in the series “The Handmaid’s Tale”.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Dystopian Fiction; Banned Books.  Laurels: 2019 Booker Prize (winner); British Book Awards 2020 Fiction Book if the Year (shortlisted).  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

 

    Meet Daisy.  She’s a young girl growing up in Eastern Canada.  Her mother and father own a second-hand clothing store, which does enough business to make ends meet.  Canada has a pretty enlightened view of women, unlike the fractured United States to the south, one part of which is now a theocracy called Gilead, right across the nearby border.  Daisy’s life is a happy one.

 

    Meet Agnes.  She lives in Gilead.  She has a mother, Tabitha, who loves her very much, and a father, Commander Kyle, who is more aloof.  But he’s a “Commander” which is a very prestigious position, and that carries over into Agnes at school, where all her (female) classmates want to be her friend.  Agnes’s life is a happy one.

 

    Meet Aunt Lydia.  She runs a place called Ardua Hall, which is a “Finishing School for Girls” in Gilead, close to where Agnes lives.  Aunt Lydia has a team of other Aunts under her, and is just about as powerful as any woman in Gilead is allowed to be.  Aunt Lydia’s life is a happy one, at least as long as nobody, male or female, discovers her little secrets.

 

    None of the three females know each other when the story opens.  But they will eventually meet up.  By which time none of them will be very happy anymore.

 

What’s To Like...

    The Testaments is Margaret Atwood’s sequel to her fantastic 1985 bestseller The Handmaid’s Tale, which I read for National Banned Books Week in 2014 and is reviewed here.  The book is written the first-person-POV, and switches among the three aforementioned protagonists in no particular order.

 

    If you’ve read The Handmaid’s Tale, you‘re acquainted with the dystopian conditions that Aunt Lydia and Agnes are subject to.  Nothing has changed in The Testaments, which takes place fifteen years later.  The same female hierarchies are in effect: Wives, Aunts, Marthas, and Handmaids.  But here the Aunts are in the spotlight, not the Handmaids.

 

    I liked that the “Canada versus Gilead” contrast of how women are treated is examined here.  Margaret Atwood is Canadian by birth, and her national pride shows through, not just on the feminism issue, but also on things like global warming and climate science.  At one point Daisy goes to an anti-Gilead rally, and I chuckled at a placard there which read “GILEAD WANTS US TO FRY!”

 

    Unsurprisingly, the book is written in “Canadian”, which is kind of a hybrid between British English and American English.  So you meet the usual weird spellings such as favourite, grey, and moulded (plus an article of clothing called a “waterproof”), but also more familiar ones like realized and judgment.

 

    It was fun to learn a bit more about the storyline’s “history”.  Gilead is primarily centered in the New England area of the US.  Texas has broken off to become an independent republic, and California seems to have done likewise.  There was a conflict dubbed the “War on Manhattan” a few years earlier, and Gilead is currently struggling to maintain sufficient manpower and money to wage war somewhere along its borders.

 

    Easter traditions in Gilead have been scaled back, in contrast to other parts of the world where Easter’s pagan roots are now rightfully celebrated.  That November holiday is now two words: “Thanks Giving”, and lest you think that only women are treated brutally in Gilead, you are invited to watch the next Particicution.

 

    There are 71 chapters in The Testaments, plus an Epilogue; which means the chapters average just under six pages in length.  Although I’ve read The Handmaid’s Tale, and highly recommend it, I don’t think you necessarily have to read it before tackling The Testaments.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.6/5 based on 30,455 ratings and 3,606 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.20/5 based on 304,150 ratings and 28.261 reviews.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Liminal Space (n.) : physical spaces between one destination and the next.

 

Things That Sound Dirty But Aren’t…

    “Not for nothing do we at Ardua Hall say “Pen Is Envy”.  (pg. 140)

 

Excerpts...

    We weren’t supposed to have best friends.  It wasn’t nice to form closed circles, said Aunt Estée: it made other girls feel left out, and we should all be helping one another be the most perfect girls we could be.

    Aunt Vidala said that best friends led to whispering and plotting and keeping secrets, and plotting and secrets led to disobedience to God, and disobedience led to rebellion, and girls who were rebellious became women who were rebellious, and a rebellious woman was even worse than a rebellious man because rebellious men became traitors, but rebellious women became adulteresses.  (pg. 24)

 

    “You had an abortion,” he said.  So they’d been rifling through some records.

    “Only one,” I said fatuously.  “I was very young.”

    He made a disapproving grunt.  “You are aware that this form of person-murder is now punishable by death?  The law is retroactive.”

    “I was not aware of that.”  I felt cold.  But if they were going to shoot me, why the interrogation?

    “One marriage?”

    “A brief one.  It was a mistake.”

    “Divorce is now a crime,” he said.  I said nothing.  (pg. 171)

 

The ability to concoct plausible lies is a talent not to be underestimated.  (pg. 387)

    The nitpicks in The Testaments are few.  Some readers found the switching around among three narrators confusing, but in the hardcover version I read, there’s an icon at the start of each chapter that identifies who’s writing it.

 

    The cussing is sparse, only 12 instances in the first half of the book, although it seemed to pick up a bit in the second half, and there were one or two references to male genitalia and female fertility cycles.

 

    For me, the ending was adequate, but not spectacular.  The plan hatched by the good guys is risky, but it goes off pretty much as planned.  The biggest threat turns out to be Mother Nature, not those in power in Gilead.  The Epilogue, consisting of the historical notes from a Symposium held even further in the future and drawing conclusions from examining the records about the events in the book, didn’t impress me.

 

    What would impress me much more is an announcement that a third book in this series was in the works, but I don't think that's going to happen.

 

    9½ Stars.  Let’s not get bogged down in the nitpicking.  The Testaments is a fantastic book, every bit as good, and frightening, as The Handmaid’s Tale.  We live in a nation that has just declared abortion to be a crime, and there are proposals to throw doctors who perform them, and women who get them, into jail.

 

    We are not far from finding ourselves in a Gilead theocracy.

The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

   1985; 311 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Genre : Contemporary Literature; High-Brow; Dystopian Fiction.  Laurels : 1985 Governor General’s Award (won); 1987 Arthur C. Clarke Award (won); 1986 Nebula Award (nominated); 1986 Booker Prize (nominated); 1987 Prometheus Award (nominated).  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

    Set in the future – roughly one generation – the United States has suffered the unthinkable – a military coup.  The constitution has been suspended indefinitely; no dissent is tolerated.  New laws have been enacted, based on religious principles.  America has been renamed the Republic of Gilead, and is now a Puritan-style theocracy.

    Coincidentally, the majority of the North American Caucasian men and women are sterile, most likely due to chemicals seeping into the food chain and drinking water.  The survival; of the race is threatened.  What can be done?

    Well, there is Biblical (Old Testament) precedent.  If the wife is unable to conceive, the husband is permitted to procreate with a suitable servant.  Which Jacob did with Bilhah, who was his wife Rachel’s handmaid.

What’s To Like...

    The Handmaid’s Tale is told in the first-person by Offred (“Of Fred”), who has been tested, found to be potentially fertilizable, and given to a Commander ("Fred") for baby-making purposes.  Having been married “before” to a divorced man, she is ineligible for matrimony, as her erstwhile husband is now considered to be still wedded to his first wife.  Their daughter has been taken from them, and Offred has been designated a Handmaid.  The alternatives are much worse, and there is some small consolation in the fact that a handmaid is a valuable commodity.

    Margaret Atwood draws upon restrictive rules from various religions to create a frightening world.  There are Paulist tenets forbidding women to speak and to be in all subjection; there's the  Hindu practice of arranged and child marriages; and the Muslim taboo on alcohol and tobacco.  Commoners are forbidden to read the Bible, and if you get caught trespassing Old Testament laws, you will end swinging from the Hanging Wall.

    Nuns, Quakers, and Baptists are wanted criminals.  But the new society is also decidedly anti-intellectual.  Universities are closed, and professors executed unless they reform.  Abortion doctors are summarily executed; there's no reform option for them.

    Atwood fleshes out this dystopian world with some fascinating theocratic details.  You can go with Offred to buy “Soul Scrolls”, see the corpses dangling from the Hanging Wall, testify at a “Prayvaganza”, and attend a very special “Salvaging”.  You’ll meet “Aunts”, “Marthas”, “Eyes”, “Guardians of the Faith”, Commanders, Wives, and of course, other Handmaids.

    As with any Dystopia, life is not as idyllic as those in power would lead the people to believe.  Societal restrictions make life miserable for all women, no matter where they are in the social caste structure.  But it’s very tough on the men as well; they can be executed for adultery or any other transgression just as easily as women can.

    OTOH if you are far enough up the Power Ladder, there are ways to skirt the rules.  Hypocrisy thrives, if only for the select few.  Yet there are ways for the powerless to resist.  Just don’t get caught.

    The tension builds to a satisfying ending, despite it being somewhat of a cliffhanger.  Be sure to read the last dozen or so pages of the book called the Historical Notes,  It looks like a boring appendix, but it's actually part of the story, and will answer some (but not all) of the cliffhanger questions.

Excerpts...

    A chair, a table, a lamp.  Above, on the white ceiling, a relief ornament in the shape of a wreath, and in the center of it a blank space, plastered over, like the place in a face where the eye has been taken out.  There must have been a chandelier, once.  They’ve removed anything you could tie a rope to.  (pg. 7)

    A thing is valued, she says, only if it is rare and hard to get.  We want you to be valued, girls.  She is rich in pauses, which she savors in her mouth.  Think of yourselves as pearls.  We, sitting in our rows, eyes down, we make her salivate morally.  We are hers to define, we must suffer her adjectives.

    I think about pearls.  Pearls are congealed oyster spit.    (pg. 114)

 “Nolite te bastardes carborundorum.”  (pg. 90.  The translation of this is given in the comments.)

    The writing is both elegant and powerful.  The pacing is good, but not perfect.  The first 90 pages or so set a terrifying scenario, but don’t move the plotline along at all.  And the segue from Offred’s present-day thoughts to one of her many flashbacks is at times annoyingly subtle.

    Still, The Handmaid’s Tale is a riveting look at the brutality of a theocracy.  And 30 years after its writing, it is still timely, what with Muslim and Christian Extremists flexing their Fundamentalist zealotry, both claiming to be doing the will of God.

    Small wonder then, that TH’sT clocks in at #88 on the Top 100 Most Frequently challenged books (the complete list is here).  And since this week has been designated National Banned Books Week for 2014, this seemed an appropriate read.

    9 Stars.  Highly topical and highly recommended.  In its own way, this book will scare you far worse than a Stephen King thriller.