Snowman, the last human alive on the planet (as far as he knows), spends most of his time contemplating Oryx and Crake. One was a lover, the other a friend. The genesis of their endangered species pseudonyms is the ‘Extictathon’ computer game monitored by MaddAddam, a shady on-line community populated by a brilliant elite.
Crake, in real life, is, or was, a gene-manipulating genius, responsible for both the pandemic that killed off the world population and the super-vaccine that enabled Snowman’s survival. The pandemic was unintentional; saving Snowman was an act of both friendship and necessity – Crake needed someone he could trust to look after his experimental project that produced a new species of human with undesirable qualities removed from their genetic make-up. They are known as the crakers.
While the crakers revere Crake as the creator, they love Oryx, who was their minder, mentor, and mother figure until she was wiped out by Crake’s pandemic. Now only Snowman remains for them, a poor sort of holy ghost of the trinity, channelling made up messages. He whiles away his time overseeing the crakers, his charges; cursing Crake, his friend; and missing Oryx, his lover.
The narrative slowly unfolds the history of Snowman, Crake, and Oryx in parallel with Snowman’s trials and tribulation in the post-apocalyptic world. Told at the individual rather than the global level, the decline and fall of western-led civilisation convinces. Incidental detail on life and death in a pandemic is all too familiar in Covid-19 times.
It is an engaging, if bleak, story where the main hook is ‘how did it get to here?’. The answer comes in trademark Atwood style with dry wit and caustic swipes at current societal trends.
There are two more
books in the MaddAddam trilogy; watch this space.
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