Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake provides a disturbingly plausible vision of how progress might undo itself. Snowman – possibly the last surviving human and half-feral – can barely summon the effort to prolong an existence he can’t see any point to. He journeys on foot through a dystopia to search for supplies while being harassed and hunted by genetically modified animals. His tale of how the world arrived here is one of societal complacency, corporatised science, diluted democracy and humans playing God. Whatever the details, readers will find plausibility and familiarity amongst the debris.

Snowman wakes up and gets down from his tree, urinates and eats his last mango. He has barely got his morning bearings before he is approached by some Children of Crake. These naked, bright-green-eyed, genetically-modified humans have been swimming in the lagoon and brought him some flotsam. Snowman, they know is an expert of these ‘things from before’ and can advise them of what is safe and what is dangerous.

Snowman lives a life of scrounging for food and supplies. Unlike the Children of Crake, the Crakers, he cannot live on grass and leaves. Yet he has made little effort to secure his long-term future. He sleeps in a tree to avoid being harassed by genetically modified animals – pigoons, rakunks and wolvogs.

One night, when sleep eludes Snowman, he finds his remaining scotch and drinks it. But he is approached by wolvogs. They look like adorable puppies but can be vicious killers. Snowman knows it is only a matter of time before they realise how vulnerable he is.

He has to find more and better ways of occupying his time. ‘His time’, what a bankrupt idea, as if he’s been given a box of time belonging to him alone, stuffed to the brim with hours and minutes that he can spend like money. Trouble is, the box has holes in it and the time is running out, no matter what he does with it.

Snowman had given to the Crakers a whole mythology about Crake and Oryx, which he now regrets as he has to stick to the narrative and the rules himself, expand on his stories and offer explanations. They have developed religious tendencies; something Crake, the engineer who made them, did not anticipate and would not have wanted.

With his supplies run out, he tells the Crakers he needs to leave for a few days. He has to make up reasons why and to deflect their desire to come with him to see Crake or at least to help him. Snowman is vexed by their misplaced generosity. And is enraged by the fact that they have made him their prophet and Crake their god.  

It has been a while since Snowman saw anyone other than the Crakers. As far as he knows, he may be the last human left. Though, searching for other survivors remains a risk he is unwilling to take. As he journeys across the dystopian landscape he reminisces on his childhood, when he was known as Jimmy.

Society was already teetering then, but few in Jimmy’s orbit seemed troubled. Jimmy’s father was an ethnographer for a corporation working on engineering pigs that could grow human organs for transplant. This meant Jimmy was fortunate to grow up within the confines of the corporation’s compound instead of the ‘Pleeblands’ which make up the most of the country.

[Jimmy’s College] was surrounded – Jimmy observed as the train pulled in – by the tackiest kind of pleeblands: vacant warehouses, burnt-out tenements, empty parking lots. Here and there were sheds and huts put together from scavenged materials – sheets of tin, slabs of plywood – and inhabited no doubt by squatters. How did such people exist? Jimmy had no idea. Yet there they were, on the other side of the razor wire. A couple of them raised their middle fingers at the train, shouted something that the bullet proof glass shutout.

Out there the world is increasingly lawless, impoverished, corrupt, polluted and populated by the diseased, cult members and terrorists. Within the compound, they are safely under heavy security as their intellectual property makes them highly valuable.

There are of course other corporations and other compounds. Corporations working on cures for disease, designer babies and pets, replacement skin to look forever youthful. The one person in Jimmy’s life who questioned things was his mother.

There were the things his mother rambled on about sometimes, about how everything was being ruined and would never be the same again, like the beach house her family had owned when she was little, the one that got washed away with the rest of the beaches and quite a few of the eastern coastal cities when the sea-level rose so quickly, and then there was that huge tidal wave, from the Canary Islands volcano. And she used to snivel about her grandfather’s Florida grapefruit orchard that had dried up like a giant raison when the rains stopped coming, the same year Lake Okeechobee had shrunk to a wreaking mud puddle and the Everglades had burned for three weeks straight.

But everyone’s parents moaned about stuff like that. Remember when you could drive anywhere? Remember when everyone lived in the pleeblands? Remember when you could fly anywhere in the world, without fear? Remember hamburger chains, always real beef, remember hot-dog stands? Remember before New York was New New York? Remember when voting mattered? It was all standard lunchtime hand-puppet stuff. Oh it was also great once. Boohoo. Now I’m going into the Twinkies package. No sex tonight!

She would argue with his father about the ethics of what they were doing; products that exploit desperate people, products that only the ultra-rich can afford, the immorality of messing with nature against the practicality of being able to survive comfortably and raise a family in a world otherwise falling apart.

It was as a teenager that Jimmy would form the two relationships that would dominate his life and make him a witness to the end of the world. The weird new kid at school he would play online games with when they weren’t surfing the illegal corners of the web. And the girl they discover on a sex trafficker’s website who would entrance them both.

Oryx and Crake is the first novel of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy. Published in 2003, and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, it was followed by The Year of the Flood (2009) and MaddAddam (2013). Together with her most famous novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, The MaddAddam Trilogy somewhat cemented Atwood’s reputation as a writer of a distinct style of post-apocalyptic fiction.

The distinctions coming from the fact that her apocalypses occur less from the threat of mechanical technology and artificial intelligence than from biological technology. And the emphasis in her post-apocalyptic world-building is less on survivorship and battling the monsters of the new world, than on the social breakdown and the unequal impact on women of this breakdown. This sets her apart from much that had come before her.

That being said, there are nods and references made in Oryx and Crake to the relevant literature of the past. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe being one of the more obvious ones.

He too is a castaway of sorts. He could make lists. It could give his life some structure.

But even a castaway assumes a future reader, someone who come along later and find his bones and his ledger, and learn his fate. Snowman can make no such assumptions: he’ll have no future reader, because the Crakers can’t read. Any reader he can possibly imagine is in the past.

The price of entry to post-apocalyptic fiction lies in the world-building. The crafted world needs to be believable for a start but also needs to contain elements of surprise to impress the reader with how well the author has thought out the implications of what has occurred. Atwood’s chosen method of apocalypse raises the difficulty further. In most regards, I think in Oryx and Crake Atwood has succeeded very well. I especially liked the thought put into the design of the Crakers; removing the gaps between humans and other animals that their engineer perceived as being the cause of much harm and human misery.

Also, in a world that he recently experienced a global pandemic, readers might find certain passages familiar.

Conspiracy theories proliferated: it was a religious thing, it was God’s Gardeners, it was a plot to gain world control. Boil-water and don’t-travel advisories were issued in the first week, handshaking was discouraged. In the same week there was a run on latex gloves and nose-cone filters. About as effective, thought Jimmy, as oranges stuck with cloves during the Black Death.

Oryx and Crake is structured as a frame story where we know the ending and the plot is to show how we get there. Similar to Citizen Kane or We Need to Talk About Kevin. In order to tell this story, Snowman must take us through his formative years – from childhood, adolescence, college and early adulthood. It is therefore also a coming-of-age story. Naturally, his experiences result in loss of innocence and painfully gained identity to make the imperfect man he becomes.

While the coming-of-age story and the story of how the apocalypse occurred has a sense of completeness about it, being the first novel in a trilogy, Oryx and Crake ends somewhat openly. In her world-building, Atwood has also kept things fairly narrowly focused for the purposes of Snowman’s tale. But she has also dropped several hints of things underway in the larger world which readers will hope to see explored in the next two novels.

Oryx and Crake is the third Atwood novel I have read after The Handmaid’s Tale and The Blind Assassin (which I still consider to be one of my all-time favourite novels though it is a very long time since I read it). She has a style of writing that greatly appeals to me. I cannot isolate the specific technique but I find her writing easy even graceful; the pages just fly by. So, even if I were not overawed by her plots or characters, I would still find her a pleasure to read.

I am also not a reader to judge a novel that is part of a series in isolation. I prefer to see how the rest of the series plays out before reconsidering its role in the whole. But it would be fair to say I enjoyed Oryx and Crake beyond my enjoyment of Atwood’s style and look forward to what the rest of the series holds.