Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood

"The Taj Mahal, the Louvre, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building...Imagine coming upon them, 3-D, life-sized, with no preparation--you'd be freaked, you'd run away and after that you'd need an explanation. At first they'll say giants or gods, but sooner or later they'll want to know the truth...Perhaps they'll say, These things are not real. They are phantasmagoria. They were made by dreams, and now that no one is dreaming them any longer they are crumbling away."

I recently read an opinion piece in the local paper complaining about the decision to teach Margaret Atwood's dystopic novel The Handmaid's Tale as the freshman common text at a Jesuit university. The university, of course, had long anticipated complaints about Atwood's speculative vision of a society run by the religious right in which every upper-class woman has a handmaid to have sex with the head of the household in the hopes of producing a child in a time of very low fertility. However, the journalist's complaint wasn't really a moral one, or rather, wasn't entirely that. She actually claimed that the novel was considered "utterly passe" in literary circles. Perhaps this is true; I don't claim to have my finger on the pulse of the literary establishment, but I have to say that I hadn't heard this myself. I think most people feel that book to be as frighteningly relevant now as it was in the 80s when it was published, and Atwood's talent has certainly not diminished in the years since, since she is consistently winning big awards and being generally worshipped by book geeks like me. If anything, Oryx and Crake is perhaps more extreme, given Atwood's clear opinion of the swift decline of our society's morality even in the twenty years since she last wrote about it. The book has the same parallel structure as Handmaid's Tale, where a single narrator (who had made the transition between society as we know it and the new society the book depicts) tells both the story of the way things are now, and how they came to be that way. In Oryx and Crake, this is Snowman, formerly Jimmy, who is the right hand man of Crake, the scientific genius who has engineered a new race of people to inhabit a post-apocalyptic world that Crake, of course, ushered in. Like Handmaid's Tale, sexuality is the most problematic and central element of human existence; in the earlier book it is in tension with religion, and in the later, it is in tension with science. Humans create hybrid animals for medical and consumer purposes (Chickie Nobs, anyone?) with the same arrogance that they employ watching kiddie porn on the Internet or ordering a hooker from Student Services at the University so that they can then be free to concentrate on their studies. Art, as one might logically conclude, is laughable in this society. Our poor narrator had the misfortune of loving words, and was relegated to attending college at the Martha Graham Academy, a catch-all school for those without scientifically inclined minds. This is one of the great underlying griefs of the novel: that our love affair with science, technology, and progress will prevent us from creating the most astonishing things about our species: the Taj Mahal, the Louvre, etc. These things tell us about our origins, the things we most fundamentally seek to understand about ourselves and our human culture. (Crake has programmed this urge out of his genetically engineered people, but it springs up over time, inevitable.) Art in the face of a terrifying hurtling headlong into the future? Not a new idea; even Atwood's done it twice now. But still moving. And most definitely not passe.