Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood

This book made me ill, literally. I lugged it home excitedly for reading week ... I had wanted to read it since I saw the poster with my friend at Indigo, and we thought it resembled The Handmaid's Tale. But it was always, always signed out at the library.

Oryx and Crake is a biotech dystopia. Elite biotechnological companies (such as for genetically modified foods) and their employees live in exclusive guarded cities with all amenities; exit to the outside world is controlled, betraying company secrets result in horrible deaths. Crake, the narrator's childhood best friend with whom he played at various computer games and hacks, becomes a mastermind in one such company, and even designs his own human species which he keeps hidden in a dome. Oryx, a child porn star whom Crake and the narrator love, is brought in to nurture the people. Crake's plan fails (or was it his plan to fail?) and we find the narrator in a primitive world, charged with taking care of "the children of Oryx and Crake."

I didn't find neither the plot nor the writing style half as captivating as The Handmaid's Tale. There was something compelling about Offred's voice, about the circular narrative that's perhaps incomplete, about the nostalgic wordplay that isn't present in Oryx and Crake. We still have Margaret Atwood wit. But Snowman's post-apocalyptical flotsam isn't Offred's regime: Snowman is just any man, Offred is ... a woman, a Eurydice, calling with a haunting voice from the dark.

And too, somehow a genetically modified pig is more unappetizing than cloaked figures hung on The Wall.

I ran through Oryx and Crake in 5 hours one night, and my copy of the novel stank of liniment. It made me ill with a sniffly snuffly cold for the rest of the week.