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.)

Very Scary Stuff

Atwood does her usual great job of not only telling a gripping tale, but of cautioning us about the costs of technology in terms of not only the effect on our planet, but also on our society. I haven't been this concerned about our future since I read Nature's End back in the 80's.

The story takes place in two times, one the "present" day, sometime in the not too distant future, and the other outlining how things got to where they are. The latter is told very close to a linear fashion, but Atwood mixes things up to match up with the present day story.

Campbell Scott (son of George C.) is disarmingly laid back in his reading, but I felt he captured the inner thinkings of Jimmy/Snowman perfectly. He is a very consistent reader, important as the book has several repeating themes.

I liked the book well enough that I stopped listening about 1.5 hours from the end, and started over to hear it with my wife on a recent car trip. It held up incredibly well, and in fact I found my enjoyment increasing as I was able to note foreshadowing I'd missed in the first listen.

Some have said the ending fizzles, but in truth the back story comes to a very satisfactory conclusion, while the current story ends with a moral dilemma. Some don't like books that don't end with a tidy bow, but I'm not among them. I was quite pleased with the ending overall, the only book I've read recently with an equally satisfying ending was Gaiman's American Gods.

The writing is tight and consistent, the reader does a great job, and the story is tense and rich in plot and characters. Highly recommended for anyone who likes a good story or is concerned about the costs of genetic engineering.

Starts out interesting then....

kind of fizzels out. The interesting characters never develop much. The story could be interesting but never really goes anywhere. It get more interesting towards the end and then just ends abruptly.

Disappointed

Despite lukewarm reviews, I purchased this book because I love some of Margaret Atwood's other works, especially "The Blind Assasin." Having listed to "Oryx and Crake" I concur with those less than stellar reviews. The book seems like it was written in a hurry and concludes with a abrupt open-ending. Fairly lame and sophomoric science fiction, especially for a writer as good as Atwood.

A parable for the zeitgeist

I have to give Atwood credit. Her depiction of the Crakers shows a lot more imagination than most of the aliens invented by the sci-fi mainstream. At the same time, she manages to tap in to our key hopes and fears about genetic manipulation. And all this is merely a sideshow on top of a clever parable that extrapolates the social ills of today to a possible cataclysmic conclusion.

Atwood throws us into a chaotic present and only slowly fills us in on how things got this way. It's a device that suits this book perfectly, since our narrator only now has the time to reflect on it all. I'm not sure, when all is said and done, that the core story on which she bases it all is solid enough to support the outcome. One is reminded of Rick's comment in Casablanca that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this world. But one is also reminded of Margaret Mead's comment that only the determination of small groups of people have ever succeeded in changing anything.

Still, Atwood manages to evoke multiple ancestral myths, and who is to say that our own culture doesn't have an equally sordid origin. Is Snowman a stand in for Prometheus? For Satan? For Judas? Or just a sad dupe left to clean up the mess? Or something else?

Snowman, sadly, is not quite interesting enough to be the protagonist of his own story. And that name never did quite work for me. It seemed to lack the imagination shown by the rest of the book. Or maybe that was the point. Regardless, the book was intriguing enough that I definitely plan to read the rest of the trilogy.

IF YOU LIKE DYSTOPIAN NOVELS - YOU WILL LIKE THIS

Overall, I thought this was a great book. The main character, Jimmy is very well developed and the story line is not implausible given current science and our corporate culture. Supporting characters, Oryx and Crake lacked complexity. Oryx is depicted as passively positive, even in the most difficult situations; Crake as inherently evil. I felt that the lengthy explicit details of Oryx's experiences with child porn and sex trafficking were overdone. If I was reading, I would have skipped over much of these details...but that is hard to do when you are listening. That being said, I it was a good listen.

A Short Story Stretched to Fill Pages

The story was fine. The premise was slightly interesting. The characters were boring.

AS A BOOK

That was the problem. The book should have been a short story or novella at best.

The story was uniquely told from the protagonist point of view as the pre-problem person, and a changed post problem person. The current time depends on which person is speaking. The post problem person looks back and comments on what has been done or said a few pages before as his old self.

There are some interesting things that happen along the way. I found it frustrating that much of the surroundings are left vague. Are their still nations or a world government? Have companies taken over the world while leaving nations alone to handle the lesser people?

Bottom line, it was a tedious but interesting YA read. It could have been done much better as a book and would have been great if reduced to a short story.

Prophetic entertainment

Delightfully inventive with a seasoned eye toward human endevour and nature. Atwood at her best.

Scary and way too relevant.

Great story that will surely keep me up at night, too relevant to today's world.

Why does Margaret Atwood always kill me with the old "The End: Or Is It?"

Well written, but...

Nothing actually happens until the last 2 chapters. It’s this Jimmy guys life story in essence. Including massive amounts psycho babble about his feelings, which personally I could do without. It adds very little to the narrative in my opinion. I mean if you needed to know all that to understand a pivotal decision later on, cool, but that doesn’t happen. I got this audiobook based on my enjoyment of reading Handmaids and the ratings, but I did not enjoy it despite the undeniable quality of the writing itself.

Read and re-read

Atwood’s dystopia are always so imaginative, but also terrifying as you see how few steps are between our current state of affairs-and ruin. Excellent book, first in a trilogy. So far I recommend re-reading this one after the Year of the Flood, especially if you like to see where plots intertwine. Like little Easter eggs for books.