Oryx and Crake

By: Margaret Atwood

Narrated by: Campbell Scott

Length: 10 hrs and 30 mins

Publisher's summary

A stunning and provocative new novel by the internationally celebrated author of The Blind Assassin, winner of the Booker Prize

Margaret Atwood’s new novel is so utterly compelling, so prescient, so relevant, so terrifyingly-all-too-likely-to-be-true, that listeners may find their view of the world forever changed after listening to it.

This is Margaret Atwood at the absolute peak of her powers. For listeners of Oryx and Crake, nothing will ever look the same again.

The narrator of Atwood's riveting novel calls himself Snowman. When the story opens, he is sleeping in a tree, wearing an old bedsheet, mourning the loss of his beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. He searches for supplies in a wasteland where insects proliferate and pigoons and wolvogs ravage the pleeblands, where ordinary people once lived, and the Compounds that sheltered the extraordinary. As he tries to piece together what has taken place, the narrative shifts to decades earlier. How did everything fall apart so quickly? Why is he left with nothing but his haunting memories? Alone except for the green-eyed Children of Crake, who think of him as a kind of monster, he explores the answers to these questions in the double journey he takes - into his own past, and back to Crake's high-tech bubble-dome, where the Paradice Project unfolded and the world came to grief.

With breathtaking command of her shocking material, and with her customary sharp wit and dark humour, Atwood projects us into an outlandish yet wholly believable realm populated by characters who will continue to inhabit our dreams long after the last chapter. This is Margaret Atwood at the absolute peak of her powers.

©2002 O.W. Toad, Ltd. (P)2003 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc.

Critic reviews

"Ingenious and disturbing.… A landmark work of speculative fiction, comparable to A Clockwork Orange, Brave New World.… Atwood has surpassed herself.”
–Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Oryx and Crake can hold its own against any of the 20th century’s most potent dystopias – Brave New World, 1984, The Space Merchants – with regard to both dramatic impact and fertility of invention.…Oryx and Crake showcases a nightmare version of the present era of globalization on a globe coming apart at its ecological seams.… It is a scathing (because bang-on) portrait of the way we live now.…Majestic.…” –Washington Post

“Atwood’s new masterpiece.…Extraordinary.… [Atwood pulls] back the curtain on her terrible vision with such tantalizing precision, its fearsome implications don’t fully reveal themselves until the final pages.… A darkly comic work of speculative fiction.” –W Magazine (U.S.)

Introduced Me to Atwood

I accidentally wrote this review for Year of the Flood, and since I can't delete it there, I'm just going to copy it here, FYI.

Putting it simply, I loved The Year of the Flood. It introduced me to Atwood and her other writings, and I haven't been able to put her down since.

The narration is fantastic, and they seem to get the voices just right for every one of the characters.

The story is cautionary, and intimate. Jimmy is an interesting (protagonist? anti-hero?). He has lots of his own issues, but his story is engaging and made me want to read the sequels as soon as possible. (Well, listen, but you get the point.)

If you are AT ALL interested in post-apocalyptic literature, get this ahora.

Dark, Dark, Dark Vision of the Future

This is a well constructed, intricate story with great characters and relationships. It's but logical. Is there hope in this series? Still waiting for that element.

Such a great beginning to the trilogy

A wonderful narration and a great story. If you like dystopian futures this is for you.

Continuing Saga

I Love the entire series, I wish it continued on with a new chapter in the story. Margaret Atwood is Awesome!

There is no Closure

The story is great, but unlike her other books, there is at least a chapter missing at the end.

Uncanny relatability distills things

Besides Atwood’s normal uncanniness of expression and word, I oddly find I am living this story right now, in some variation.

I am reading from an off-season cottage on the beach, sound of waves permitting indoors. I’m alone with my two autistic children after we fled eviction from our home in Brookline MA due to effects of a brain tumor. We hid illegally in senior housing for a month, then landed at an empty off-season beach cottage renting cheap. I’m alone because I have few people in my life and nobody to help.

I am only in first chapters and this story appears to be oddly completely relatable down to swearing at the ocean and lamenting people lost. I realize suddenly, perhaps all of Atwood’s stories are my stories, perhaps that is why I don’t just love them.

Atwood’s books are the kind of books you need.


I’ll end in parallel by mentioning I often think my kids with level-1 autism are the next evolution. The green eyes however, are mine.

Thank you Margaret Atwood for giving us the books we need. 💛

Razor sharp, chilling and bleak

Campbell Scott's narration blends serious doom with contemporary snark in a story about the end of the world that left me wanting to work backwards and change events for a hopeful finish. So cinematic and way before its time...before The Walking Dead, before Avatar, before I Am Legend...with a heartbreaking longing for the things we take for granted on planet Earth.

Overdone

I am a great fan of Atwood, but not her speculative fiction. This book, like "The Handmaid's Tale", screams "Author's Message" in every sentence. It is overwrought, obvious. The characters are at best two-dimensional, and seem to be symbols standing in for traits, rather than real people possessing those traits. I found Oryx to be particularly irritating, a Western stereotype of an Asian female. This is especially annoying coming from a writer who is supposedly one of the greats in feminist fiction.

Crake is similarly a stick-figure genius, and for such a smart guy his choices are pretty dumb. His naive, new-agey Crakers would last about a day in a wilderness filled with rampaging pigoons, wolvogs, and bobkittens. Atwood's attempts to shroud him in mystery seem an inelegant attempt to deflect closer examination of his motives, which don't hold together. Jimmy / Snowman is only slightly more compelling. A great deal is made out of how he is not a genius like Crake, but at times he seems closer to mentally retarded. I can't believe anybody would be so clueless about survival, even if they had been brought up in a cocoon.

Despite these flaws, at times I found the audiobook hard to put down. I wanted to find out what had happened. But by the end of the book I felt cheated and manipulated by the same kinds of tricks that writers of cheap suspense novels use. The backstory was not that interesting, and has been done better before. Comparisons to other popular works are obvious.

The ending is hollow and unsatisfying. It has neither the happy ending of a cheap suspense novel, nor the bleak ending it seemed headed for. I think that this is because the story had no logical place to land - Atwood's point was in the build-up, so why waste time crafting a reasonable ending?

I give it three stars because the world is well-visualized, and because Campbell Scott's reading is superb. Atwood should stick with complex character situations, as in "Cat's Eye."

Top-notch literary science-fiction

If only all Audios were this good. Fine, serious writing, gripping and fast-moving plot, inventive settings, delightful turns of phrase, plenty of surprises, and a powerful message with a challenging conclusion. A classic dystopian vision of arresting originality, compelling characterization and great depth (with just the occasional anachronism - aspirin? hard-copy CVs? but these are quibbles). The narration is spot-on too.

Very strange and slow. Nice.

Well constructed, well written. Very strange. Very nice :)