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Hudson Review, The, Spring 2004 by Wilhelmus, Tom

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NOT EVERY NEW BOOK IS AN EVENT. We come to the next books of noteworthy authors with mixed expectations. It makes no sense to believe they should be noteworthy too, but you read on. And sometimes you're surprised.

No one would expect, for example, that Margaret Atwood's apocalyptic new novel Oryx and Crake1 (2003) would be the huge success of her Booker Prize-winning The Blind Assassin (2002). That book was a magnificent compendium of all the things we expect from Atwood. It is a long, historical, and highly readable narrative about the lives of two sisters growing up in a small manufacturing town outside Toronto in the twentieth century. It is keenly observed, a copious rendering of all the significant events of the last century reflected in the lives of the sisters, more specifically in the details of their lives revealed in the photographs, food, fashion, music, movies, houses, cityscapes, a voyage on the Queen Mary, invented newspaper articles, and reminiscences-the significant upheavals of the twentieth century through the rummage of individual lives.

The relation between the two Chase sisters, Laura and Iris, would remind you of other pairs in Atwood's fiction who begin close but grow increasingly removed from one another as the novel progresses. In this case, by the end of the novel, it is difficult for the narrator, Iris, to distinguish what is real about her sister from what is rumored or imagined. Laura's suicide is reported on page one. Iris' narrative is a long meditation on that fact but is complicated for the reader both by Iris' evasiveness about her own actions and motivations and by two other embedded stories within the general plot. One of these stories portrays a love affair between an upper-middle-class woman and an apparent drifter, red-organizer, and writer of cheap, thirties-style pulp science fiction-apparently a man, Axel Thomas, whom the sisters had met in an earlier episode. The other is a lurid science fiction tale, made up by the woman's demon lover during assignations in rundown, disreputable places.

All three narratives depict Atwood's familiar themes regarding how women's identities alter and blur because of sexism. Iris' victimization by her husband, the destruction of Laura's innocence and idealism, the allegory of "The Blind Assassin" tale itself all hint in that direction. This subtext, however, seems less important to Atwood in this novel than the obvious pleasure she takes in assembling the details of her characters' milieu. Perhaps this is what made the novel so popular. It contains a safe, even sentimental fascination with the past while only hinting discreetly at the violent stirrings of historic change.

In a similar fashion, I would argue Atwood's primary interest in Oryx and Crake amounts to providing an archeology of the future-past in detailing the remnants of a destroyed civilization. While this book is primarily a science fiction thriller about genetic engineering, its principal pleasure, for the author and the reader, is in the details.

The novel opens on one of the last human survivors as he crosses a wasteland of twenty-first-century flotsam and jetsam searching for remnants that will aid his survival. Snowman, as he is called, encounters strange wildlife and a new humanoid species and grants us the pleasure of experiencing the destruction we always knew was coming. In a series of flashbacks, we discover that many of the worst experiments in bioengineering were the work of a likable evil genius, Snowman's friend from childhood, Glenn, also known eventually as Crake, who destroys mankind in order to create a more docile and loving race.

Most interesting, however, is not the rather obvious machinery of the plot but rather the archeological insight Atwood brings to life today as she looks back on it from the future. Snowman and Crake originate in a society of cruel divisions of the haves from the have-nots, caused by corporatism and capitalism. Both are raised in gated communities and given the means to education denied to others. Those of the elite who are not as promising, like Snowman, are shunted off into the arts (he goes to the Martha Graham Academy "named after some gory old dance goddess of the twentieth century"). Those who are more promising, like Crake, go into science (and to "the Watson-Crick Institute," the new Harvard of this futuristic time). Both have been raised on advanced computer games and the Internet (where they mostly visited porn sites). Both treat ordinary society as a place to go slumming and ordinary people as objects to be manipulated or improved. When in doubt about Atwood, don't trust her plots so much as her material details or her genres as much as her implied social criticism. Like most science fiction, this novel is not about the future but rather about current history and what it might lead to.

Michel Houllebecq's next novel, Platform,2 also contains apocalyptic messages about a late-capitalist society veering towards annihilation. Although not as well known as Atwood, Houllebecq has gained a significant following in his native France where he has the reputation as a major anti-liberal spokesman and darling of the ultraconservative right. He has appeared on television in this guise and has become the favorite author of conservative politicians like Jean-Marie Le Pen.