Oryx and Crake

Pigs might not fly but they are strangely altered. So, for that matter, are wolves and racoons. A man, once named Jimmy, lives in a tree, wrapped in old bedsheets, now calls himself Snowman. The voice of Oryx, the woman he loved, teasingly haunts him. And the green-eyed Children of Crake are, for some reason, his responsibility.

The narrator of Oryx and Crake calls himself Snowman. When the story opens, he's 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 wolvags ravage the Pleeblands where ordinary people once lived, and in 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.

Reviewed by Jenni Murray
I'm not a fan of fantasy or science fiction. Doris Lessing at her most doom laden is, I find, merely depressing. I would have to be dragged screaming to read, let alone watch, The Lord of the Rings - I tried in the sixties and failed to get past the first chapter. I never could stand the silly, made up names and places. The only time I've ever stayed with a futuristic novel and been terrified by its prescience was Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. The moment when Offred puts her credit card into the hole in the wall at the bank and is rejected, only to find all women's accounts have been frozen overnight, was so horrific some said it couldn't happen. Then we heard about the Taliban and Afghanistan. In Oryx and Crake she issues another profoundly important warning.
Snowman is the central character of the novel, surviving, just, in a world where the science we dabble in now has truly gone mad. It's a world populated by bugs which bite, woolvogs and pigoons which present a constant threat to Snowman's continued survival and that of the Crakers, the ultimate designer babies. As we follow Snowman through his desolate present, foraging for food and fighting off the predators, he takes us back to his earlier life as Jimmy whose best friend is Crake.
Jimmy's parents are scientists, working for OrganInc farms on the pigoon project. The pigoon was desiged to produce human tissue organs in a pig host that would transplant smoothly and avoid rejection. His mother's job as a microbiologist is to protect them from infection from microbes and viruses. They live in the Compounds for the top people, so Jimmy's childhood is privileged and comfortable until his mother - who has long shown her unease at the global warming which caused her family orange grove to dry up - escapes from the Compound and becomes a hunted dissenter.
His comfort is his friendship with Crake. Together they watch pornography or animal snuff sites or hedsoff.com, which plays live coverage of executions in Asia, or even alibooboo.com, with 'various supposed thieves having their hands cut off and adulterers and lipstick wearers being stoned to death….there was an assisted suicide site too - niteenite.com.' The vision of a future not too far from our own is chilling.
As the boys grow up Crake's genius takes him to the top university, Jimmy's to a less impressive insitution, but they stay in touch. Both fall in love with the same woman, Oryx, first spotted as a child on a pornography site, and Crake becomes a very big cheese indeed at RejoovenEsence. He brings Jimmy and Oryx to work with him on the Paradice Project where the object is to create a race of perfect individuals - beautiful and docile, with no racial tension, no territorial ambitions, no destructive tendencies and no sexual tensions.
Atwood's command of the science required to make her dystopian vision believable is impeccable. But it's the representation of the ultimate result of meddling with nature, the unpicking of our obsession with youth and ever greater comfort, the consequences of the relaxation of moral imperatives and the tragic inevitability of the power mad genius that make this beautiful and compelling novel a wake up call for our time.

Jenni Murray OBE has presented Woman's Hour on Radio 4 since 1987. She is a graduate in French and Drama at Hull University and began her broadcasting career at BBC Radio Bristol. She has presented Newsnight, Today and currently presents The Message on Radio 4. She writes for various newspapers and magazines and is the author of The Woman's Hour, Is It Me or Is It Hot in Here? and That's My Boy! She is President of the the Fawcett Society, a visiting professor at the London Institute and holds four honorary degrees.