He is scrabbling about in a post-Apocalyptic confusion that we don't fully understand until the end of the book. In Oryx and Crake we meet Snowman, known as Jimmy in a previous time, and now apparently the last fully human person on Earth.

Skillfully distant, brilliantly dark, startlingly cold, fully realized, Atwood has created a world that looks enough like our own to be convincing - perhaps even threatening. In Oryx and Crake we're dealing with technology and genetic manipulation gone so horribly awry that, as the book opens, it looks very much like the end of the world.īut whatever it looks like, Oryx and Crake feels like cyberpunk, as well as it's ever been written. In The Handmaid's Tale, the woes of the world could be laid at the door of Christianity run amok. The future Atwood evokes this time around has a different shape and feel. Though the book invites comparison to 1985's The Handmaid's Tale, an earlier dystopic novel set in some unnamed future, Oryx and Crake is a very different type of book. The measured - some would say cold - prose, the careful meter, the exploration of psyche and the speculation about what-may-bes. It is unabashedly, unstintingly, unapologetically Atwood. So I should begin by telling you this: if you fall into either one of the above categories - and my straw poll tells me you will - don't expect Oryx and Crake to be the book that alters your opinion. Either: Oh, wonderful! I love her work! Or: Oh, Atwood! I couldn't even get through Handmaid's Tale or Surfacing or The Blind Assassin or insert the title of any one of her books here. How did she pull that emotion from me here? That feeling from me there? But reporting to people that I was reading the latest Atwood always bought me one of two responses. I often stop mid-parargraph in awe and wonder. People frequently ask me what I'm reading and, while it was Oryx and Crake, I'd enthuse fairly freely.

I formulated this fairly weird comparison while preparing to write a review of Oryx and Crake, Atwood's dystopian take on the future that could be. People who enjoy it can eat it on just about anything savory any time it's on offer.

People who don't like cilantro can't tolerate it, even in small doses. Margaret Atwood 's writing is like cilantro. Review | Oryx and Crake: A Novel by Margaret Atwood

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