We see clearly that Crake is ambitious, and he has some big ideas. Glenn’s online persona is Crake – a name which sticks, and it is while the boys are watching online videos that they first see the arresting face of Oryx in a piece of child pornography. When he is in high school Jimmy meets Glenn – and the two become good friends, playing online games and watching dodgy underground videos. Outside these compounds – are the pleeblands – a chaotic, unregulated world where poverty and viruses run rife. Jimmy had grown up in the privileged world of the scientific communities living inside enormous compounds. Through a series of flashbacks, we see Snowman’s past, when he was Jimmy, and before the population had been seemingly wiped out. “Sometimes in the dusk he runs up and down on the sand, flinging stones at the ocean and screaming, Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit! He feels better afterwards.” Snowman is nearing starvation – the supplies he had previously provided himself with are running out – and he desperately needs to replenish them. The Crakers view Snowman as a teacher – looking to him for guidance and explanation for the things they don’t understand.

Nearby are a band of human-like creatures – who Snowman calls Crakes, – the children of Crake, who have developed their own rites and rituals and bring Snowman a fish once a week. We are introduced to Snowman a post-apocalyptic character living in a tree, wrapped in old bedsheets, alone in a strangely altered world. “He doesn’t know which is worse, a past he can’t regain or a present that will destroy him if he looks at it too clearly. It is both a brilliant and terrifying vision, and possibly one that only works when it comes from the razor like imagination of Margaret Atwood.

I chose to read Oryx & Crake a work of dystopian, speculative fiction which imagines a world as it could so easily be given the right conditions. I recently read Stone Mattress a collection of superb stories that really put me in the mood for more Atwood. I was rather delighted when the librarything virago group, elected to read Margaret Atwood books during November.

Oryx and crake goodreads