Oryx and CrakeA Novel

The author of The Handmaid's Tale returns to dystopia.
The worst that can be said about Margaret Atwood's craggy, wintry fiction is that her politics form a predictably noisy distraction on the topography of her most imaginative narratives. But she's a fabulist of the first order, and comes close to creating autonomous beings that sometimes threaten to walk away from their host novels in a way that eluded other specialists in dystopia such as George Orwell.

Despite its post-apocalyptic trappings, Oryx and Crake is the most contemporaneous of Atwood's recent fictions; hers is a world in which the consequences of globalization reduce her characters to almost neanderthal privations. (Think Oliver Assayas' 2002 film Demonlover played with the implications of trans-global pornography). Thanks to deft flashbacks, we piece together the story of Snowman, who lived in awe of Gatsby-esque best friend Crake in Soviet-style dachas called Compounds before the world ended. Snowman's attempt to assemble what's left of his life is complicated by a romance with Oryx, an adolescent porn star of a film called HottTotts whose influence on Snowman forces him to realize what damage Crake had wrought. As with a lot of science-fiction, Atwood burdens the narrative with a lot of background color and exposition; she doesn't trust the potential of her characters to project their pain all by themselves. Let us praise actor Campbell Scott, whose dry-as-gin inflections are the ideal balm. Still, as always, trust the strangeness of Atwood's tale. And its contemporaneity.