Reading: Oryx & Crake
Sometime in 2002, someone must have bought Margaret Atwood a DVD player and a DVD. "This, this is surely the future," Ms. Atwood most likely muttered. She then wrote the pretty aggressively mediocre Oryx & Crake, where DVDs and CD-ROMs make several appearances.
Atwood wants to be a futurist in the way Tom Wolfe wanted to be an anthropologist of early-adult sexuality in I Am Charlotte Simmons. Both fail, because both are 200 years old and stopped being especially relevant when they saw the new century on the horizon. Wolfe tried to warn us, breathlessly, that freshmen in college were having sex -- in case you didn't know or weren't paying attention or were currently fellating a 19-year-old frat boy and couldn't be bother to stay au courant. Atwood wants us to know that she's got her fingers on the pulse of the new technology: DVDs, CD-ROMs, websites, and online pornography.
This would be fine for both of them, were they writing their respective novels in, say, 1985. However, it's 2006. DVDs slipped into the mainstream in 1999. And as far as poor Tom Wolfe: if you haven't had sex with a 19-year-old, it's because you haven't tried.
Oryx & Crake is another dystopian novel from Maggie Atwood, one that, according to the front cover blurb from The New Yorker, "does Orwell one better." It's insights like that that could push The New Yorker into the ranks of Atwood and Wolfe if it isn't careful (especially if it doesn't tell Anthony Lane that snarky comments are witty and fun when you're drunk, gay, and Truman Capote filling in for Oscar Wilde; however, maybe you could just review the fucking film and save the bon mots for the Dick Cavett show). The only way Atwood's novel does Orwell one better is in page length. Orwell ends his morality play at 336 pages. Atwood keeps chugging along for about 40 pages more.
It's the future, and it sucks. Lots of genetic modifications have created new animals like pigoons and rakunks and whatever, Mags. Also, it's a time of cynaicism because too many companies are too interested in too much profit, and they do a lot of questionable things. There's a guy we meet at the beginning who calls himself "Snowman" who is really this guy named Jimmy. Jimmy, as a teen, befriends some kid named Glenn, who later calls himself Crake. And then, eventually, they all tuck into a tidy love triangle with a former underaged Asian whore named Oryx.
There are moments that are interesting, especially when Atwood describes the rationale behind some of the genetic modifications, and how these efforts bite everyone in the ass when there's no true infrastructure to keep track of who's done what to whatever. But mostly it's a plodding novel that shows how out of touch Atwood is with the current state of technology.
For instance, back to the DVD/CD-ROM thing. Ostensibly, when the novel deals with Snowman as a boy named Jimmy, it isn't 2003 (when the novel is published) -- it's much later. In this far-flung future, though, DVDs are still the cutting edge rave, even though DVDs as we know them are in serious trouble from DVR technology. Likewise, Jimmy thinks of CD-ROMs as old-school ways of getting information; however, again: no. At the rate technology is expanding, it would be like a kid from today preferring to get his info from papyrus scrolls or the occasional stone tablet. And it's those moments of technological disconnect that pulls the reader (and by "the reader" I mean "me") out of the novel.
And y'all? I'm a technological retard. For serious. When I feel smarter than a sci-fi novel? And I don't really understand how to program my cell phone? Then yeah: you've got some problems, Maggie Atwood.
In comparing Oryx & Crake to Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go -- it's no contest. Ishiguro, who has said in different interviews that he had no real interest in getting the science "right" in his novel, is a better futurist than Atwood could ever be. And he does this primarily by not over-explaining the future at all. By leaving the vagaries of the technology to the reader, he can instead focus on the interpersonal dramas -- which, as Tolstoy said, are both all alike and completely different for each family.
To remember back when Atwood was relevant and good, I recommend the following:
Atwood wants to be a futurist in the way Tom Wolfe wanted to be an anthropologist of early-adult sexuality in I Am Charlotte Simmons. Both fail, because both are 200 years old and stopped being especially relevant when they saw the new century on the horizon. Wolfe tried to warn us, breathlessly, that freshmen in college were having sex -- in case you didn't know or weren't paying attention or were currently fellating a 19-year-old frat boy and couldn't be bother to stay au courant. Atwood wants us to know that she's got her fingers on the pulse of the new technology: DVDs, CD-ROMs, websites, and online pornography.
This would be fine for both of them, were they writing their respective novels in, say, 1985. However, it's 2006. DVDs slipped into the mainstream in 1999. And as far as poor Tom Wolfe: if you haven't had sex with a 19-year-old, it's because you haven't tried.
Oryx & Crake is another dystopian novel from Maggie Atwood, one that, according to the front cover blurb from The New Yorker, "does Orwell one better." It's insights like that that could push The New Yorker into the ranks of Atwood and Wolfe if it isn't careful (especially if it doesn't tell Anthony Lane that snarky comments are witty and fun when you're drunk, gay, and Truman Capote filling in for Oscar Wilde; however, maybe you could just review the fucking film and save the bon mots for the Dick Cavett show). The only way Atwood's novel does Orwell one better is in page length. Orwell ends his morality play at 336 pages. Atwood keeps chugging along for about 40 pages more.
It's the future, and it sucks. Lots of genetic modifications have created new animals like pigoons and rakunks and whatever, Mags. Also, it's a time of cynaicism because too many companies are too interested in too much profit, and they do a lot of questionable things. There's a guy we meet at the beginning who calls himself "Snowman" who is really this guy named Jimmy. Jimmy, as a teen, befriends some kid named Glenn, who later calls himself Crake. And then, eventually, they all tuck into a tidy love triangle with a former underaged Asian whore named Oryx.
There are moments that are interesting, especially when Atwood describes the rationale behind some of the genetic modifications, and how these efforts bite everyone in the ass when there's no true infrastructure to keep track of who's done what to whatever. But mostly it's a plodding novel that shows how out of touch Atwood is with the current state of technology.
For instance, back to the DVD/CD-ROM thing. Ostensibly, when the novel deals with Snowman as a boy named Jimmy, it isn't 2003 (when the novel is published) -- it's much later. In this far-flung future, though, DVDs are still the cutting edge rave, even though DVDs as we know them are in serious trouble from DVR technology. Likewise, Jimmy thinks of CD-ROMs as old-school ways of getting information; however, again: no. At the rate technology is expanding, it would be like a kid from today preferring to get his info from papyrus scrolls or the occasional stone tablet. And it's those moments of technological disconnect that pulls the reader (and by "the reader" I mean "me") out of the novel.
And y'all? I'm a technological retard. For serious. When I feel smarter than a sci-fi novel? And I don't really understand how to program my cell phone? Then yeah: you've got some problems, Maggie Atwood.
In comparing Oryx & Crake to Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go -- it's no contest. Ishiguro, who has said in different interviews that he had no real interest in getting the science "right" in his novel, is a better futurist than Atwood could ever be. And he does this primarily by not over-explaining the future at all. By leaving the vagaries of the technology to the reader, he can instead focus on the interpersonal dramas -- which, as Tolstoy said, are both all alike and completely different for each family.
To remember back when Atwood was relevant and good, I recommend the following:
posted by Mike at 4:23 PM
5 Comments:
Don't forget "Lady Oracle"! "The Penelopiad" is very good, also.
Yes, I found Oryx & Crake to be crap too.
Too bad, because I really wanted to like it. It is almost as if she wote it in 1982, tucked it away under the plans for her long-distance signature machine, and only found it after making an exorbinately large hair dye purchase which she had to finance somehow.
I can't even get into the long distance signature machine thing. I mean, really. This is your "future," Atwood? Some idea you cribbed off of Ben Franklin?
The hair dye business made me laugh out loud for a very long time. And then I had to explain why to a lot of people who still don't get it.
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I felt the same way about Oryx that everyone else did. It felt like a watered down repeat of Handmaid's but not nearly as interesting or as well written.
I hope that the omission of Blind Assassin from your list of Atwood hits was just that because it is by far my favorite novel of hers.
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