the casual critic

“It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”, is an observation attributed to Marxist critic Frederic Jameson. And indeed, our culture is rife with stories that tell of the end of the world, often as a result of capitalism, yet rarely do we see stories about capitalism’s transcendence. Post-apocalyptic stories walk a fine line between serving as a warning, and expressing our fears that the trolley can no longer be switched to a track where it will not kill all of us. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx & Crake sits within the latter category, being less a warning and more a bleakly cynical tale of human powerlessness.

We see the world of Oryx & Crake through the eyes of Snowman/Jimmy. Snowman is the last surviving human, an obsolete relic from a vanished civilisation. Through Snowman, Atwood shows us that an individual human is a contradiction in terms. Devoid of relations with other humans or a shared humanity, Snowman is a subject without purpose, who doesn’t so much survive as merely exist. His only role is to look after the ‘Crakers’, a group of post-human humanoids who have inherited the Earth, and who could probably have done without Snowman’s guidance if it wasn’t for the dangerous trash humanity has left behind.

Jimmy is Snowman’s pre-apocalyptic incarnation. Flashbacks tell us of Jimmy’s childhood, teenage years and adolescence. It is in these chapters that we discover the world before the fall. It is a world already ravaged by climate change, with American society split between those living a nasty, brutish and short existence in the ‘pleeplands’, and those, like Jimmy, who are fortunate enough to live in the highly competitive but at least vaguely secure Compounds of a handful of biotech megacorps. We don’t see a lot of the world beyond the United States, but the implication is that is riven by war, plague, and famine.

However, the bleakness of Oryx & Crake does not lie in the actions of the unscrupulous corporate giants whose actions threaten to destroy the world. If anything, the megacorps have a somewhat cartoonish feel to them, with names like HealthWyzer and RejuvenEssence. They are also by now a fairly worn trope, and although Oryx & Crake predates cultural products such as WALL-E or The Outer Worlds, we had already seen this representation in Snowcrash, Fallout or Bladerunner. Instead, the cynicism comes from the fundamental lack of agency of almost everyone in the book, creating a pervasive feeling of inertia and fatalism.

The inertia is most pronounced for Snowman. Although he eventually goes on a pilgrimage, it is difficult to be invested in the outcome of anything that happens to him, because he serves no other role than acting as the story’s narrator. The ambiguity about his fate at the end of the book evokes indifference rather than any sense of dramatic tension.

The same holds true for the Jimmy chapters, because in the end Jimmy is a fundamentally uninterested and uninteresting character, and those two things are not unrelated. Jimmy’s is a stereotypical story of emotionally deprived childhood, detached adolescence and damaged early adulthood. Jimmy neither cares for nor is interested in the world he inhabits, apart from his imbalanced friendship with the titular Crake and his bizarre and unhealthy obsession with a child seen in a pornographic video, who turns out to be the titular Oryx. Like Snowman, Jimmy doesn’t really have a purpose in life and so more or less drifts through it rather than exerting any real agency.

The same lack of agency is evident in all the other characters in the novel, who are also disappointingly one-dimensional, from the emotionally distant mother and the disinterested but jovial father, to the corporate goons and the overwrought artists of Jimmy’s university years. Apart from Jimmy’s mother, none of them exhibit much interest in the world they inhabit, or any desire to act upon it.

The only character with a real sense of purpose is Crake, and this is something Jimmy senses when they first meet. Crake is a boy/man with a vision, and this alone makes him different, mysterious, enviable and above all, powerful. Crake is also a sociopathic genius, as evidenced by his effortless hacking of his uncle’s bank account as a child and his inevitable ascendence to the most prestigious university and employer.

It is this position of Crake as the only character with any real capacity and will to act which turns Oryx & Crake’s message into one of fatalistic cynicism. For what hope is there of averting the apocalypse if the only people who can change anything are superhuman geniuses who believe that humanity is the virus? The book presents no alternatives to the mad scientist theory of history: its mundane characters are powerless and uninterested, its bright intellects are corrupted, and the denizens of the pleeplands are as useless as the proles in Orwell’s 1984. What little collective action the book presents is only there as background, and in any event is totally ineffective.

And maybe that’s the point. Maybe Atwood’s warning is about the dangers of collective inertia. But with Crake presented as the only counterpoint, it is unclear what lesseon we are then expected to take away from this story. The pervasive sense of futility also makes the book generally quite boring. Jimmy/Snowman is just not very compelling as a character, nor is the support cast, which makes it difficult to care about anyone in the book, or what happens to them, including the billions of humans who ultimately die, though generally off stage. On top of that, Crake’s role in the story is telegraphed with a 12 foot neon sign as soon as he is introduced, making the sequence of events quite predictable. One doesn’t introduce a mad scientist in Act I if one doesn’t intend to use them.

This is not to say that Oryx & Crake doesn’t provide some interesting food for thought: on the nature of being human, the point of the arts and culture, or the capitalist death drive. But on the whole, its characters and plot are too superficial to be compelling, and its world is neither an effective warning nor an imagining of an alternative to our current trajectory. We remain trapped in the neoliberal frame where there is no alternative: the trolley has only one track, and there is nothing we can do to stop it.