Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood

2003, 376 pages.
A few days ago there was a note hanging on my door: there’ll be no water today for a few hours. It is going to be a fairly hot day. I prepared a few bottles of drinking water in the refrigerator, tap water in a few pitchers and some buckets of water to flush the toilet. I am still a little anxious: what if that’s not enough? What if there’ll be some problem and the water supply will not return as promised?
It is frightening to realize how fragile we are and how dependent on modern technology. This is the kind of book that both feed and fed from these fears. What happens if one day all the technology we depend on disappears and we have to take care of ourselves? I’ve a few of those lately, like “The Road” and “The Chrysalids”, but I was lucky to keep the best for last, because this book has so much more, and it is so well written, so that it didn’t feel like recycling a used idea.
The story begins with “Snow man”, a man who wakes up on a tree, and seems to live in a world with no technology or modern civilization, where he has to fend for himself in the wild nature. We go back with his memory to his childhood, before the world turned into what it is in his present.
The book reveals the details gradually, along the story line, and any additional detail I will give here will be a spoiler and reduce the pleasure of reading, guessing, and finding out what happened and how. So I will try to write very generally without revealing too much.
Snow-man childhood passed in a world very similar to ours, or what it might look like in the near future, when the global warming and over population will continue to take its toll, and generic engineering will make more development. The author has wonderful imaginative inventions of how things look like in this world.
The story is written in a non-linear form. We start with Snow-mans’ present, go back to his past with his memory, and sometimes to other people’s past, about which he learns while talking to them in his past. Meanwhile we advance with Snow-man’s present. Questions are answered gradually along the way, only to raise new questions and to explain the opening point of the story. Usually I am wary of this kind of story, because when there are so many questions, it is not always clear and the end if all of them were answered, but not in this case. Though there were many questions and mysteries I never felt confused along the book, and at the end I felt that all the questions are answered. It takes a lot of skill to write a book in this form that is still very readable and intriguing, and Atwood did it so well.
This is not an easy read. It is frightening, and it’s so real that it raises the question – could it really happen? But it is well worth it.