I had not read Margaret Atwood - besides her wonderfully quirky short stories - for many years, after feeling her arrogance roll off her books like The Robber Bride and The Handmaid's Tale. These were powerful books, yet there was such a strong sense that she knew how powerful they were, that she was saying, "Look how amazing I am." Recently, though, my camp book club chose Oryx and Crake for our summer novel, and I challenged myself to give Atwood another chance.
Oryx and Crake is a gut-wrenching, mind-blowing look at the future. Although it has many obvious connections to The Road by Cormac McCarthy, one main difference was that while McCarthy's father and son were on the periphery of whatever disaster had changed the world, Atwood's characters are at the heart of the apocalypse. I seldom read books where I am driven towards the climax in such an intense state of curiosity: with this one I couldn't stop devouring this book. I got a front row seat to the end of the world.
A novel that I was reminded of regularly as I read was Daniel Quinn's Ishmael. In that story a talking gorilla is warning us about the state of world, and how we are driving it towards catastrophe. He explains it by saying that many, many years ago humanity jumped off a cliff, and since then has been assuming that we are flying, when in fact we are falling - we have been falling for a long time. Oryx and Crake shows us what it might look like when we hit the bottom, and it is a picture that I will not soon forget.
Within a week of finishing it, I bought The Year of the Flood - the sequel to Oryx and Crake - and I ate that up even faster than Part 1.
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