Book Club - Oryx and Crake
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
This writeup was provided by Helena Winston who works at Random House, and is a PhD canditate fo at Cuny Graduate Center in Art History.
In Oryx and Crake, Atwood, best known for her harrowing examination of the oppression of women in The Handmaid's Tale, theorizes yet another possible post-apocalyptic world of our own making. Her book skillfully examines how our current civilization could conceivably end if certain aspects were extrapolated to their extremes.
This is a world in which OrganInc farms provides people with organs grown in pigs, NooSkins helps to reverse the aging process, and ChickieNobs (chickens with excess appendages and no brains) provide the perfect source of food. People may be monitored and their travel restricted, but it's all to protect them from potentially hazardous areas, people and microorganisms. There's no real Big Brother, it's just the logical end of profit-driven capitalism. Everyone has just let it happen. And many times it doesn't seem all that bad. Yet the fact remains that a young man named Jimmy has ended up cowering in the trees, hiding from wolvogs and pigoons and trying to protect a group of green-eyed, beautiful, men, women and children from an oblivion that they literally have just arrived in, and know nothing about.
This is a story about a world in which people act, but often know not what they do; how personal suffering and even good will can motivate people to do horrible things; and how most importantly, stories can spin out of control and may (or may not) lead to a kind of redemption.
The Reading Group had mixed feelings about the book. Some found it extraordinarly fascinating, while others found themselves slightly frustrated. It was agreed that a clearer understanding of the facts of the plot may have been useful earlier on, as the denouement unfolds rapidly in the last 50 pages.
