Oryx and Crake
By Margaret Atwood
Vintage, 2004, 400pp.
The Short of It:
You know when they say that books should make you feel things? Yeah. Oryx and Crake will definitely leave you feeling things.
The Rest of It:
*No Spoilers*
I purchased this book at least a decade ago. I started it a few times and couldn’t get into it, but then a group of us online picked it as a book club pick, and so I looked for my copy, found it (amazing given the pile of books I have) and dove in.
I’ll be careful not to give much away because most of what you feel while reading it, is shock and dismay that such things can exist, and actually do today.
Atwood describes a bleak world. There is the before, and then there is the after. As a reader, you get a glimpse of how we got here but there is much left to the imagination as to what prompted it all. Dystopian worlds are bleak and lifeless but with Oryx and Crake, the story is teeming with life but in the most disturbing way.
Animals are hybrids. For example, Raccoons and Skunks become their own breed. Pigs? Something else entirely. People, aka humanoids, run around without clothing as there is no need for it. Food is scarce. But just like now, there are the HAVES and the HAVE NOTS. The Haves are pulling the strings and everything in this story is Biblical in nature.
Think Adam and Eve and the serpent.
Oryx and Crake is part of a trilogy which includes The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam. This book was a tough read. It was hard on my soul. Not just because of the times we are living in, but because the subject matter is delicate and that is why I will include a trigger warning here for sexual content because Atwood does not handle it in a delicate way. It’s front and center, in your face. I had to put the book down a few times but since it was a group read, I kept going.
Atwood called this story a “romance” and that just blows my mind.
Will I read the others in the trilogy? Probably, yes. Because as numb as we can all be to the nonsense of this world, you have to feel things now and then to know that you are still here.
Source: Purchased
Disclosure: This post contains Bookshop.org affiliate links.
Book Chatter 
When a book makes you feel things, good and bad and scary and ugly, it’s worth the read.
That’s what I believe too. Parts of it angered me so much given our current President and his tastes for children.
Any boom that makes us have such an intense reaction to it, is worth keeping. They tend not to be books I’ll read again, but I will never part with them. Not unless it’s a book I loathe, but that’s a different type of reaction.
Brilliant review.
Thanks, Ryan. The people I read it with won’t be reading the other books in the trilogy but it definitely piqued my interest. It was ROUGH but got such a reaction out of me.
Ti, I read this many years ago, but I can’t for the life of me remember anything about it other than that there’s a character named Snowman. Atwood’s books are disturbing, social commentaries. I’m currently watching The Handmaid’s Tale (I’ve read it twice) and it’s terrifying to think we may be headed in that direction!
That’s what makes it disturbing is that she seems to have predicted the future in many cases. Perhaps the books were meant to warn us but we are so there right now.
I am finally getting around to reading Nine Black Robes, and I feel some of the same feels you expressed about reading this book—the ability to look back in time and see how things were lining up, along with the regret we can’t help but feel in wishing we had done a few things differently then.
YES. With Oryx, the child sex trafficking is so on the nose with today’s headlines. Really hard to stomach and hard to believe that people pay for this still today.
This book was really bleak. I read it for my book club back in 2014. It also took me a while to get into. The ending goes faster. I hope your discussion is good? Here’s my review at:
https://www.thecuecard.com/books/oryx-and-crake/
Turns out the people who chose the book to discuss online hated it and could not deal with the topic so we never discussed it. Just me and my thoughts. I am almost done with the next book though, The Year of the Flood and like it a lot more.
I’m not sure this is a book I’d want to be reading or brave enough to read now.
Child sexual themes. Very disturbing.
I never read this book but I did read The Year of the Flood, not realizing it was part of a trilogy. I was very disturbed by it, too. Good review.