gilda_elise

“In the beginning, there was chaos..." Margaret Atwood's chilling new novel moves beyond the futuristic fantasy of her 1985 bestseller, The Handmaid's Tale, to an even more dystopian world, a world where language--and with it anything beyond the merest semblance of humanity--has almost entirely vanished.
Snowman may be the last man on earth, the only survivor of an unnamed apocalypse. Once he was Jimmy, a member of a scientific elite; now he lives in bitter isolation and loneliness, his only pleasure the watching of old films on DVD. His mind moves backwards and forwards through time, from an agonizing trawl through memory to relive the events that led up to sudden catastrophe (most significantly the disappearance of his mother,) and the arrival of his mysterious childhood companions, Oryx and Crake, symbols of the fractured society in which Snowman now finds himself, to the horrifying present of genetic engineering run amok. His only witnesses, eager to lap up his testimony, are "Crakers", laboratory creatures of varying strengths and abilities, who can offer little comfort. Gradually the reasons behind the disaster begin to unfold as Snowman undertakes a perilous journey to the remains of the bubble-dome complex where the sinister Paradice Project collapsed and near-global devastation began.

Even though there are a few times of humor, underlining feelings of tragedy and melancholy permeate the entire novel. How could it not? As Snowman relives his life, from his boyhood, where he meets Glenn, who he will later know as Crake, the trajectory of his own tragedy, as well as that of the world’s is slowly revealed. Things are bad even then; Jimmy and Glenn live in one of the wall-offed “compounds” built for the scientific and financially elite. Everyone else lives in an ecological distressed landscape, one that is progressively getting worse.

As they grow up, Glenn becomes Crake, a scientific genius who may have motives of is own. By the time we know Jimmy as Snowman, there is little left. There is a small amount of hope, which I assume is addressed in the book’s sequels. But the sequels are of the same world, not the same characters, so this novel stands well on its own. It's an intriguing premise, a well written book, and well worth a read.