August 25, 2003

Oryx and Crake: Original and Crap

I've just finshed Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. It's a long time since I read such a sublimely written piece of utter bullshit, so I thought I'd post a review.

The story, set in the near future, revolves around themes taken (apparently at random) from life in the late Nineties early Noughties: CamelCase BrandNames, internet-mediated kiddie porn, and, above all, genetic engineering.

What Crake had said was this: "Jimmy, look at it realistically. You can't couple a minimum access to food with an expanding population indefinately. Homo sapiens doesn't seem able to cut himself off at the supply end. He's one of the few species that doesn't doesn't limit reproduction in the face of dwindling resources. In other words — and up to a point, of course — the less we eat, the more we fuck."

Er, no we don't. Like most of the rest of the book, this passage uses well-crafted sentences to describe concepts that are plain wrong.

So, if you're going to read this this work of science fiction for the fiction then you'll probably enjoy it because the quality of the writing is outstanding. (Also noteworthy is the sheer malign rage of the prose — including plentiful and varied use of the f-word. This would have come over as self-conscious swaggering if it had been written by a twentysomething man, but feels genuine from a female author of Ms Atwood's maturity and skill.)

However, if you're looking for any science — or a vaguely well-informed and considered discussion of the perils of genetic engineering — then it would be better to look elsewhere.

There's been quite a few botched experiments [in trying to transfer cat characteristics to human-like animals], as Snowman recalled. One of the trial batch of kids had manifested a tendancy to sprout long whiskers and scramble up the curtains; a couple of the others had vocal expression impediments; one of them had been limited to nouns, verbs, and roaring.

This isn't Molecular Biology 101, it's Tom & Jerry's Greatest Hits. Perhaps it's supposed to be a joke, but it doesn't come over that way, set as it is among almost 400 deadpan, angst-ridden pages. Ms Atwood appears to think that scientists can mix the genes of diverse pairs of animals to derive viable organisms with recognisable characteristics of both just as easily as she mixes the letters of their names to create such mythical beasts such as pigoons and rakunks. Well, they can't.

The book has other credibility problems too: the major genetic engineering disaster upon which the plot relies assumes that it would be quite easy to wrap a malign biological virus in a pharmaceutical product and feed it to a large proportion of the human population before anyone realised what was going on. But it isn't, either technically, legally or logistically. In fact, I can't imagine, even in my worst nightmares, such a thing being possible at all given the way that drugs are developed and regulated — and the trends are towards it becoming more, not less, difficult. (The only virsues for which something like this is possible are the software variety; maybe, somewhere in Ms Atwood's fertile imagination, she's got the two confused.)

Ironically, the world described in this book — depressing, brutal, feral — feels a lot more like the world that mankind emerged from a few thousand years ago than the one towards which we're heading. There are a lot of things worth debating about artificial genetic modification (including selective breeding as well as genetic engineering), but you won't find them in this book. Instead we have a fine example of something else in the modern world that's depressing, and perhaps even dangerous: an outstanding and popular writer wasting their considerable talents on a thesis that holds less water than a macrame eggcup.

Posted by timo at August 25, 2003 06:46 PM | TrackBack
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