Oryx and Crake

Updated on Jan 03, 2024

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Oryx and Crake is a novel by the Canadian author Margaret Atwood. She has described the novel as speculative fiction and "adventure romance" rather than science fiction because it does not deal with things "we can't yet do or begin to do" and goes beyond the realism she associates with the novel form. Oryx and Crake was first published by McClelland and Stewart in 2003. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction that same year, and for the 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction.

A television adaptation of Oryx and Crake and its follow-up novels The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013) is being developed by Darren Aronofsky under the working title MaddAddam.

Margaret atwood reads opening of oryx and crake

Plot

The novel focuses on a post-apocalyptic character with the name of Snowman, living near a group of primitive human-like creatures whom he calls Crakers. Flashbacks reveal that Snowman was once a boy named Jimmy who grew up in a world dominated by multinational corporations and privileged compounds for the families of their employees. Near starvation, Snowman decides to return to the ruins of a compound named RejoovenEsence to search for supplies even though it is overrun by dangerous genetically engineered hybrid animals. He concocts an explanation for the Crakers, who regard him as a teacher, and begins his foraging expedition.

In Snowman's recollection of past events, Jimmy's family moves to the HelthWyzer compound where his father works as a genographer. Jimmy meets and befriends a brilliant science student named Glenn. Jimmy begins to refer to him as Crake, when he uses that name in an online trivia game called Extinctathon. Jimmy and Crake spend much of their leisure time online playing games, smoking "skunkweed" and watching underground videos such as live executions, graphic surgery, Noodie News, frog squashing and child pornography. During one of their child pornography viewings, Jimmy is very much love- struck by the gazing eyes of a young Asian girl seen in the porn.

After high school, Crake attends the highly respected Watson-Crick Institute where he studies advanced bioengineering, but Jimmy ends up at the loathed Martha Graham Academy, where students study humanities, only valued for their propaganda applications. Jimmy gets a job writing ad copy, while Crake becomes a bioengineer at RejoovenEsence. Crake uses his prominent position to create the Crakers; peaceful, gentle, herbivorous humanoids who only have sexual intercourse during limited polyandrous breeding seasons. His stated purpose for the Crakers, actually a deliberate deception, is to create "floor models" of all the possible options a family could choose in the genetic manipulation of their future children. Crake's bio-engineering team consists of the most expert players gathered from the online Extinctathon community.

Crake tells Jimmy about another very important project, a Viagra-like super-pill called BlyssPluss, which also promises health and happiness, but secretly has other major and ultimately fatal effects. Crake officially hires Jimmy to help market it. At the Rejoov compound, Jimmy eventually sees a human in the Craker habitat and recognizes her as the girl from the pornographic video. Unaware of Jimmy's obsession with her, Crake explains that her name is Oryx and that he has hired her as a prostitute for himself and a teacher for the Crakers. Oryx notices Jimmy's feelings for her and makes herself sexually available to him. As their relationship progresses, Jimmy becomes increasingly fearful that Crake has found out about it. He also makes a promise to both Oryx and Crake that he will look after the Crakers if anything happens to them.

After Crake's wonder drug BlyssPluss is widely distributed, a global pandemic, deliberately caused by it, breaks out and begins wiping out the human race and causing mass chaos outside of the protected Rejoov compound. Realizing that this was planned by Crake all along, and sensing that something dangerous is happening regarding Crake and Oryx, Jimmy grabs a gun to confront Crake, who is returning with Oryx from outside the compound and needs Jimmy to let them in. Crake presents himself to Jimmy with his arm around an injured and silent Oryx, saying that he and Jimmy are immune to the virus. Jimmy lets them in, whereupon Crake looks directly into Jimmy's eyes and with the words "I'm counting on you," he slits Oryx's throat with his jackknife. Jimmy then immediately shoots Crake dead.

During Snowman's journey to scavenge supplies, he cuts his foot on a sliver of glass and becomes infected. He returns to the Crakers' camp and learns that three ragged true humans are camping nearby. Snowman follows the smoke to their fire and surreptitiously sees two dangerous looking men and a woman. Unsure of whether to befriend them or shoot them, Snowman checks his broken watch, thinks "Time to go" and makes up his mind.

Main characters

Snowman, whose original name is Jimmy, is the main protagonist; the story is told from his perspective. The name "Snowman" is short for "abominable Snowman", a reference to the Yeti, a mythical ape-like creature of the Himalaya. For the online-game Extinctathon, Jimmy temporarily also has the animal code name "Thickney" (bush thick-knee or bush stone-curlew, Burhinus grallarius), which Crake chooses for Jimmy from an Australian bird known for inhabiting cemeteries (p. 81).

Crake, whose original name is Glenn, is Jimmy's childhood friend; an excellent student in high school, he becomes a brilliant geneticist and turns into a version of the mad scientist when he devises a plan to rid the earth of Homo sapiens and replace this destructive, poorly designed species with a more peaceful and environmentally friendly version. His code-name for Extinctathon is from the red-necked crake, a small Australian bird. In Robin Elliott's essay on Atwood, he explains the parallels between Glenn and the famous pianist Glenn Gould. Not only are their names the same, but also in the novel it is said that he is named after a famous pianist. Furthermore, Atwood has explained that Glenn has Asperger syndrome, just like the pianist.

Oryx is a mysterious woman, recognized by Jimmy and Crake as the waif-like girl from a child pornography site. Crake hires her for sexual services and as a teacher to the Crakers, but she secretly becomes Jimmy's lover as well. After the catastrophe, her memory continues to haunt Snowman. Her name is from the oryx, an African antelope: "It's not even her real name, which he'd never known anyway; it's only a word. It's a mantra" (p. 110). She is described as likely originating from the South or South-East Asian region.

Sharon is Jimmy's mother. She once worked at OrganInc like her husband, but stopped due to an untreated nervous breakdown related to her opposition to what the bio-corporations are doing. She is depressed and fights with Jimmy's father often. Jimmy vies for his mother's attention, but she spends much of her time sitting in her bathrobe and smoking. Eventually, Sharon runs away from the HelthWyzer compound, abandoning her son and taking his treasured genetically engineered pet rakunk named "Killer." She takes up with various underground opposition groups, and is hunted by the deadly CorpSecorps corporate security services. Jimmy is haunted by his mother's absence, and is visited often by CorpSeCorps inspectors attempting to track her whereabouts.

Jimmy's father, unnamed in the book, works first for OrganInc and later for HelthWyzer as a scientist. He is heavily involved in the development of pigoons. He is more pragmatic about the morality of genetic splicing than his wife. After Jimmy's mother deserts the compound, he pursues a relationship with his laboratory technician, Ramona, and they eventually marry.

Ramona is one of Jimmy's father's lab technicians at OrganInc. Ramona, Jimmy, and Jimmy's father frequently go out to eat together. When Jimmy's father leaves OrganInc to accept a new position at HelthWyzer, Ramona makes the move with him. After Jimmy's mother's mysterious departure, Ramona moves in and takes on a motherly role in Jimmy's life.

Beginnings

Margaret Atwood started writing the novel much earlier than she expected, while still on a book tour for her previous novel, The Blind Assassin. In March 2001, Atwood found herself in the Northern region of Australia, birdwatching with her partner during a break from the book tour. Here, while watching the red-necked crakes in their natural habitat, she was struck with inspiration for the story. However, Atwood explained that the work was also a product of her lingering thoughts on such a scenario throughout her life, as well as spending a great amount of time with scientists throughout her childhood. She stated

Several of my close relatives are scientists, and the main topic at the annual family Christmas dinner is likely to be intestinal parasites or sex hormones in mice, or, when that makes the non-scientists too queasy, the nature of the Universe.

Atwood continued to write the novel through the summer of 2001 while visiting the Arctic North, witnessing global warming's effect on the region. However, shaken by the September 11 attacks, she stopped writing for a few weeks in the autumn, saying, "It's deeply unsettling when you're writing about a fictional catastrophe and then a real one happens". However, with the looming questions of the end, Atwood finished the novel for release in 2003. These questions in Oryx and Crake, Atwood explained, are "simply, What if we continue down the road we're already on? How slippery is the slope? What are our saving graces? Who's got the will to stop us?"

Critical reception

The book received mostly favourable reviews in the press. The Globe and Mail, Maclean's, and The Toronto Star ranked the novel high among Atwood's works and Helen Brown, for the Daily Telegraph, wrote "The bioengineered apocalypse she imagines is impeccably researched and sickeningly possible: a direct consequence of short-term science outstripping long-term responsibility. And just like the post-nuclear totalitarian vision of The Handmaid's Tale, this story is set in a society readers will recognise as only a few steps ahead of our own." For The New Yorker, Lorrie Moore called the novel "towering and intrepid". Moore wrote, "Tonally, 'Oryx and Crake' is a roller-coaster ride. The book proceeds from terrifying grimness, through lonely mournfulness, until, midway, a morbid silliness begins sporadically to assert itself, like someone, exhausted by bad news, hysterically succumbing to giggles at a funeral." Joyce Carol Oates noted that the novel is "more ambitious and darkly prophetic" than The Handmaid's Tale. Oates called the work an "ambitiously concerned, skillfully executed performance".

Joan Smith, writing for The Observer, faulted the novel's uneven construction and lack of emotional depth. She concluded: "In the end, Oryx and Crake is a parable, an imaginative text for the anti-globalisation movement that does not quite work as a novel."

In a review of The Year of the Flood, Ursula K. Le Guin defended the novel against criticism of its characters by suggesting the novel experiments with components of morality plays.

Sequels

The Year of the Flood was released on 7 September 2009 in the United Kingdom, and 22 September 2009 in Canada and the United States. Though chronicling a different set of characters, the follow-up expands upon and clarifies the relationships of Crake with Oryx and Jimmy with his high school girlfriend Ren. Glenn makes a brief appearance. It also identifies the three characters introduced at the end of the original, and finishes the cliffhanger ending.

The third book in the series, MaddAddam, was published in August 2013.

TV adaptation

Darren Aronofsky's company Protozoa Pictures is developing a television adaptation of the entire trilogy, under the working title MaddAddam. Aronofsky is to serve as executive producer and possibly director, with the script written by playwright Eliza Clark.

The project was formerly being developed for HBO; in 2016 Aronofsky said that the network was no longer attached, but confirmed that the scripts were written and the project was still underway.

References

Oryx and Crake Wikipedia

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