New Feature time here at Some Winged Creature....and some insight into Where I Get Some of These Ideas.

Once a week or so I'm going to try to post a book review, since I read all the time and at least 1/2 of it isn't trash.

My first Creature Feature is....

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood ( Anchor Books, copywrite 2003)...

As you may know, Margaret Atwood is one of my favorite authors. This is the story that goes around English departments about her/ her work:

Back in the bad old days when women were still fighting for things like the right to get paid as much as a man, and not get kicked out of nursing school if they were pregnant, there was a brilliant young lady who was an English Major. She had a warm relationship with one of her professors, who was a true scholar with an open mind, but, like most professors of his time and place was something of a crusty old codger devoted to The Canon....which at that time was all great literature written by European or American men. Like many of his students, the young lady thought there should be challenges to The Canon. These students weren' t saying all this stuff wasn't great literature. They were just saying there was literature that was just as great that had been written by people who weren't men in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Frighteningly enough, this is still, kinda sorta being debated....

Anyway, the professor really did have an open mind, and he was trying to see his student's point of view, so he asked her what she thought was an example of great literature that was not part of The Canon. She suggested ( insert any Margaret Atwood book written before 1978 here - usually The Edible Woman) so the professor read it. They met again a few days after he finished it and she asked for his opinion. "Well, I can certainly understand why you feel she is a great writer. She is...but....her point of view is SO Feminine. It was jarring to me it. It was like looking at the world through a woman's eyes."

The student didn't say anything. She just looked at him.

And, sort of as an homage to Atwood, no one ever says what happened next. No one says "the professor got it" or "the professor still didn't get it". Like almost all of Margaret Atwood's work, the ending is open to a great deal of interpretation. After a book full of stunning visual images, well developed charecters, and clear trends....she never quite gives her readers those few definative words that would bring the story down firmly on the side of hope or cynicism. That's for the reader to decide. She trusts us that much.

Oryx and Crake is no exception, and most of it is very much in the mode of her previous work. Margaret Atwood novels are not about the destination ( the ending, the facts of which are often known in the beginning) but about the journey. One notable exception here is that humans are represented by a male, and it is though his eyes we see the story unfold. The "conclusion" has already come about at the begining of the book. Snowman, previously Jimmy, is living in a post apocolyptic world with only The Children of Crake, who are products of genetic engineering, for company. The story is as much about Jimmy's relationship with Orxy and Crake, who emerge as a sort of backward Adam and Eve, returning humans, or something like them to a state of grace.

This is not to say that the book has religious overtones. In fact, main line religeous organizations are ignored and activist religeous groups are rendered largely irrelevant in the context of the story. Noticeabley lacking in the world that Atwood creates, are any form of morals or ethics. From Jimmy's earliest memory forward, The Almighty Dollar battles The Individual Conscience. Not hard to figure out who "won".

I didn't read this book right away when it came out, because I wasn't looking forward to all the cliches of science fiction that seemed to populate it. Yes, it contains the dreaded Corporation-as-Nationstate, and the done-to-death walled and isolated centers of learning leading to an ever widening gap between the haves and the have nots. And yes, there is certainly a fair share of more and more monsterous beings emerging from the walled bio-tech labs.

But Atwood has been described as a "spoon full of sugar" writer. Her touch with this material is so light, so subtle and deft that the book is a page turner. Readers find themselves just cruising along with Jimmy inside his walled world, accepting the norms he accepts, such as created animals without heads ( "no brain, no pain") and finding the same things funny. In the midst of a story where Jimmy has been abandoned by his mother, subjected to the benign neglect of his father, is hanging on by the skin of his teeth as a "words" person in "numbers" world, and headless "ChickieNobs, which produce white meat in two weeks, we learn: "That team was also working on a line of bathroom towels that would behave in much the same way, but they hadn't yet solved the marine life fundementals: when algae got wet it swelled up and began to grow, and the test subjects so far had not liked the sight of their towels from the night before puffing up like rectangular marshmallows and inching across the bathroom floor." Yep. You're reading a cautionary tale about genetic engineering and chuckling under your breath. Is that even allowed?

Moreover, readers are so entranced by the love triangle between the three main charecters that we only barely take note when Jimmy brings home a bucket of the same ChickieNobs which horrified him so badly, when he first saw them, he passed up real chicken at the next meal. By the end of the story there is no more real chicken, of course, the environment is completely trashed, and very little "real" anything. Crake has concluded that reality is relative, each corporate campus, described in sequence, is more Disneyesque than the last. Humans unlock great genetic secrets: they use them for cosmetics and cheaper coffee beans.

The real horror of the story is not so much that mutants may or may not inherit the earth, but the fact that almost all of what made us human in the first place was eaten up in a quest for the Next Big Thing, long before the inevitable germ "escaped" the inevitable test tube. And it wasn't because of some bullying terror, some dictator, some clear and present danger...but just because of people like Jimmy and like us, who find it so easy to live behind walls, to not really pay that much attention to the news, to accept the world as it is presented to us. After all, he's only human. But will he be THE only human, the last man standing?