Oryx and Crake Takes my Cake

Lame title alert!

Considering this is my first post, don't judge the entire blog on it.  Yeah, OK, thank you, goodbye.

But ignoring that, I'm here to talk about my favorite book.  Weird, right, because most people probably can't choose just one favorite.  Maybe they choose a handful.  I can for sure choose my least favorite, though.  JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye.

Hmm.  Swell.  What kind of name is Holden, anyway...

Seriously, what was that book even about...  I felt like the entire book could've been summarized in the last chapter.  Now, that was a pretty lame book.

But I regress.

A book the world will probably never see the likes of ever again, which I guess I can count as my favorite, would be Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake.  Really.  Never, ever again.  Kind of like Led Zeppelin.

This book is kind of a love story and kind of an adventure, but it's mostly a dystopian.  I say mostly because there are flashbacks.  Lots and lots of flashbacks.

The book starts with a man named Snowman.  You never really find out what his real name is until the very end.  He's just sitting in some tree, eating mangoes, because... well... he can't find anything else to eat. I guess.

Oh, yeah, and he's the last man alive.  In the entire world.  Ever.

But I digress.

Flashback to when Snowman was a little kid.  Supposedly.  Maybe like the great future grandchild of you or I, that's how far Snowman's story starts in the future.  Except his name is Jimmy, and he lives in the kind of dystopian future where people take a pill and they never get sick again.  Wouldn't that be convenient.

Flashforward to Snowman, and he does whatever he wants because he's the only human.  But he comes across other humanoid things once in a while.  Homo sapien sapiens.  And, oh, yeah, his childhood best friend created them.  They are now called Crakers.

Flashback to childhood, where Jimmy meets Glenn.  They choose code names that were once living, breathing species of animals, and Glenn chooses Crake.  One day, online, the two come across a child pornography website where they see Oryx.  Crake prints her photo and gives it to Jimmy.

Crake works in a biological engineering type place where they create pills and seeds and genetically modified organisms like this...

Pigoons ^^

and this...

and even this...

So somehow Jimmy ends up being in charge of the ad campaign for Crake's company, which is currently marketing a pill that reverses the affects of aging, and meanwhile Jimmy is busy falling in love with Oryx.  Let's not forget how Snowman keeps hearing her voice long after she's gone.

It's Oryx's job to go out and sell this pill, but soon after every town she marketed it to, ever, breaks out in a severe viral contagion that no one has the cure for.

That is, except for Crake.  Who somehow slipped the cure to Jimmy.  And his genetically modified humans that only have the best qualities of actual humans.

Jimmy later discovers this, but when he does, Crake kills Oryx and is then killed by Jimmy, who hides out in Crake's Paradice compound which was designed especially for the Crakers.

Jimmy eventually realizes he can't stay in there forever, and, having promised Crake he'd take care of the Crakers, decides to relocate them all to a beach where they can live peacefully.

Flashforward to Snowman, who, while narrating all this, decides he now needs to go back to the Paradice compound to get himself some more food and supplies.  He reflects upon his past in his journey there.

Once he gets there, he hurts his foot badly but ends up eavesdropping on some radios that somehow still work.  Here, he learns he isn't the only human left on planet Earth.

But it's a twist ending so I can't possibly tell you what happens once he returns to his beach.

This is book is sort of uncomfortable.  Almost as uncomfortable as this picture of Mitt Romney in comparison to a Muppet.

Uncomfortable.

All of Margaret Atwood's books freak me out.  Like, what if that actually happened?  What if the world suddenly became overrun by perfect human beings in place of the rest of us?  Aren't we the ones that are supposedly perfect?

Freaky.

But I digress.

I was able to sort of anti connect with this book, in a way.  It's hard to tell if Jimmy ever figures out Oryx and Crake are sleeping together (because they are), but in the end he stays loyal to Crake, for some reason.

Weird.

I don't understand it.

It's a thinking book.  It's really hard to think about what it proposes, too, just like a lot of her other books, but that's why I remembered it so well.

I guess.

Hopefully I'll be dead by the time we're stormed by nasty pigoons or Homo sapien sapiens or an excess of mangoes.  Or cats with Nicholas Cage faces.