When the novel coronavirus was just started to spread, I saw a few videos of patients from Wuhan — throbbing, shivering like demon-possessed hapless victims under hospital blankets. I had an immediate impression, they were dying.
And indeed they were. In one video, I saw a doctor just dropped where he or she stood, like a banana tree, sliced through by a machete.
Those videos gave me the shivers and the whole thing felt astoundingly unreal. And my reading of Oryx and Crake only fuelled that fire of paranoia. There is also a pandemic in the book and now I know that the real thing wasn’t as severe as the one in the novel but back then I could feel the horror of the imagined world that was oozing into mine, poisoning the very sense of my perceived reality.

But Oryx and Crake is not a horror tale. Nor is it merely a sci-fi novel. Margaret Atwood is mostly known for her best known work The Handmaid’s Tale where she portrays a futuristic society where America turned into a radical religious state where basic human values are undermined and women are subjugated to heinous dehumanization.
Oryx and Crake’s tale is also deeply intertwined with the social aspects of our supposed future life. While The Handmaid’s Tale infuriates us, Oryx and Crake takes us to a dark valley of desolation and post-truth.

The Protagonist, Snowman, is the only surviving man on earth. But he talks to the crakers sometimes. Teach them stuff about the world no longer exists. Crakers are humanoid, less intelligent lab version of humans that no longer have any need to feed. They can just use the sunlight to survive as plants do and they have sex only when it is needed.

But the earth isn’t entirely timid either. There are genetically mutated vicious animals lurking around all over the place and keeping them at bay is something Snowman has to be constantly vigilant about.

But why bother? Why go on? What really happened? Where did all the humans go? And how? That story slowly unravels through Snowman’s tale. When he was known as Jimmy. An everyman doing a boring 9-5 job he was not very good at. But his life takes a massive turn, when he comes across Crake, again. Crake was a brilliant student from his childhood with whom he saw brutal videos and child porno online and now a powerful member of the genetically advanced world the novel is set in. Also meeting Oryx, the girl from the porno he felt in love with as a kid.

There were a lot of takeaways for me from the novel. The dysfunctional family of Jimmy can represent the turmoil of the society and how some portion of it was fighting back. Not unlike our real world.

I think Atwood has done a great job with the romance part. The obsessive sweetness of lovers, post traumatic stress disorder of the child porno actor and the bout between concept of monogamy and the desire to have someone by any means are some areas Atwood explored.

I really liked the part that the mass extinction started from people wanting to have their boundless lust satiated without risking any unwanted pregnancy. As if they fornicated to nothingness.

Now, the reason I said this book deals with post-truth is because I don’t feel like Atwood was dealing with objective ideas about some of the moral and social constructs of our world — rather her own thoughts and feelings regarding them. But she wasn’t particularly pressing about that as the everyman, Jimmy AKA The Snowman counters those radical ideas expressed in the book and he can be dubbed as one of us, of our world in every way. Perhaps, Atwood herself is torn between those ideologies.

During the initial period of Coronavirus pandemic, reading Oryx and Crake was a bad idea. I had a few nightmares, all involving that world Jimmy inhabited and I was as helpless as him in it. Most importantly, the book sucked me in and kept me there with a serpent’s embrace — cold as iron in winter morning and as hard as it gets. If you ask me, I’d have a hard time coming up with a post-apocalyptic title that can beat this one.

Do give it a read if you liked The Handmaid’s Tale, an Atwood fan, or generally, a literature oriented person.

Thanks for reading and have a great day. :)