Book
Review
Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake
by
Alexander
Moseley
by Alexander Moseley
 I
have just finished two novels by authors at different ends of the
fame scale: internationally renown Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s
latest work, Oryx
and Crake, and a locally known author, with whom I correspond
on the joys and tribulations of self-publishing, Robert Rennick’s
first novel The
Fallen.
Firstly
Robert’s work: set on the Isle of Wight where I am presently enjoying
a literary sojourn writing the sequel to Wither
This Land, The Fallen follows the adventures and
investigations of a local journalist following the story of a girl
found at the bottom of the local cliffs; accident, murder, or suicide
being the three logical possibilities. The novel’s easy to fly through
and is appropriate holiday literature. It reads like a grittier
version of the English murder mysteries and kept me up till 4am
last night. I mention the book because it has a link with Margaret
Atwood’s Oryx and Crake – namely both authors refer to the
child-sex and web-site pornographic publication industries. A sad
reflection of modern times.
Incidentally,
I was wondering whether the ubiquity of adult-oriented spam enticing
voyeurs to enjoy all kinds of ocular attractions/distractions motivated
either writer? The internet has unleashed a vast panoply of opportunities
for enjoying a global market from the comfort of one’s home for
all types of consumption, and as markets expand so do the opportunities
for those engaged in ethically peripheral or immoral practices.
The opening up of the East Bloc following the end of the Cold War
led to a surge of stories on slavery and child exploitation, and
the collapse of the inflated Asian economic bubble had the effect
of expanding such nefarious trades. But criminality attracts publicity,
and when tied to the exploitation of children it attracts media
hysteria and knee-jerk legislation to control, regulate, prohibit,
and licence entire markets and range of activities for law-abiding
folk. The usual illogical retort by the protectionists and interventionists
follows: "Child abuse is an evil committed by people making
choices, therefore let’s abolish choice." Or: "free trade
includes the evil trade of child prostitution – ban free trade!"
Why’s this wrong? – have a read of Steven
Yates’s article on logical fallacies. But neither author goes
off on a rant about the evils of child sex trade per se, but both
present them as elements to their unfolding plots, and, as such,
they reflect an element of modern culture or indeed of the depravity
of a minority that often takes disproportional media headlines.
Margaret
Atwood’s Oryx and Crake is set in the future in a new post-apocalyptic
dystopia. The narrator, ‘Snowman’, is a male survivor of a global
plague unleashed by geniuses working for genetic-engineering companies.
While struggling to survive – he is, as far as he knows, the only
human survivor – he reflects on glimpses of life before the disaster,
and slowly as the book proceeds the reasons why things went wrong
are unravelled by Snowman.
A
very different future was presented in Atwood’s earlier vision of
dystopia.
In
1985 – publishing a year after the dreaded Orwellian year 1984
– Atwood published The
Handmaid’s Tale, which relates an America taken over by
totalitarian Christian fundamentalists. Written from the point of
view of a woman, it tells the story of her effective imprisonment
as an Old Testament handmaid to a patriarch, Fred: her purpose in
life is to produce children for him and her name reflects his ownership
– she is Of-Fred: Offred; she lives in constant fear of her life
as detractors are stoned to death or hanged. But the system cannot
abolish Offred’s privacy of the mind and its desires – and therein
lies the plot’s tension.
The
style and format of The Handmaid’s Tale I recall finding
strange (but then I was new to Atwood’s work) and can be off-putting
for some readers; but while the novel produces a similar impression
to viewing a post-modernist painting, it should not be missed. In
a very interesting Guardian article (which I found through lewrockell.com’s
search engine), Atwood describes
the impact George Orwell’s Animal
Farm and 1984 had on her when she was young: she
is certainly a literary defender of individuality and ably reflects
on the potential direction society could take should it pursue certain
ideological strands to their conclusion (discussed below). In many
respects, in Oryx and Crake, Atwood merges Huxley’s Brave
New World with Animal Farm in her vision of large
science companies playing with genetic codes.
But
the Canadian writer is not easily boxed – in fact she comes down
heavily on those who would like to drop her into an –ism formula.
I recall a lecture she gave at York University, Ontario, where she
had taught: asked if she was a feminist, she expressed her misgivings
about the term and after a few minutes’ explanation left the audience
reeling from the implied attempt to catch and label her. However,
while her philosophical biases are evident (and she advances theories
libertarians and objectivists would reject), her wit, satire, and
irony constantly twist and turn – she is a master of pluralism of
meaning yet does not fall into annihilating meaning as post-modernists
would enjoy (if they can enjoy anything!). In that respect
I find her akin to St Augustine, whose City
of God and Confessions
I’ve recently waded through. – both writers’ literary works leave
one wondering about the person behind the pen. (Nonetheless, I can
sympathise: I have had to assert with several journalists interested
in my novel that the ideas therein are more important than
the author – that some of the ideas are designed to provoke reflection
and push the implications of ideas and may not ‘reflect the views
of the author.’ I’m not keen on being boxed into an –ism either.
Boxing – as in labelling rather than pugilism – is for collectivists
and those with a shallow sense of self who sadly seek an identity
in a box. [Hey, kid, look what Santa’s brought you – your own identity
all wrapped up with a plastic ribbon. There you go, open it!] Could
such people be called ‘identyists’ and the search for a convenient
identity ‘identityism’ or ‘boxists’ and ‘boxism’ … ?)
Atwood
is certainly a respectable craftsman in wrapping the power of ideas
up in prose. Updating the potential apocalypse for recent scientific
and cultural developments, Oryx and Crake draws on various
contemporary cultural and hence ideational developments, the most
important for the novel being the potential horror of ‘what would
happen if the reins of progress slip from our hands’ as the official
website for the book asks. Snowman’s reflections describe a
world that had become increasingly anarchic and even feudal. Government
is never mentioned (unless that is what Atwood calls the CorpSeCorps,
who are like FBI types); instead, across North America, people either
live and work in the dangerous ‘pleeblands’ or the ‘Compounds’ run
by what can be described as quasi-governmental companies, who employ
their own security measures and who, like in Orwell’s vision of
1984, are good at uncovering the dealings of your private
life if you begin to question the wisdom of life in the Compounds
of the purposes to which everyone works.
The
governing ethic of the Compounds is utilitarian – everything is
ethically acceptable so long as it is for the good of the Compound.
Here, Atwood’s critique is a rather standard but always useful reminder
of what may be lost in an enforced application of sacrifices demanded
for the public good.
Such
Compounds of course do exist: where government fails to provide
the service of protection, private services evolve to meet demand.
But in Atwood’s vision, they have produced separate social strata
in which the elite, working for the companies, have all their requirements
looked after without the need to enter the cities and suburbs populated
by the allegedly less intelligent, where violence, disease, lack
of hygiene, and sex markets seem to rule. Not that sex is missing
from life in the Compounds: indeed, the universities offer sexual
services as part of their student welfare program! Herein we have
elements of course of Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics,
as well as standard Hegelian-Marxist thinking that society naturally
bifurcates into rulers and ruled rather than a complex web of mutually
beneficial voluntary arrangements and trades.
The
scenario of Oryx and Crake, falling into the genre of science-fiction,
is highly reminiscent not just of Brave New World, 1984,
and Animal Farm, but also H.G.Well’s Food
of the Gods, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,
and other romanticist reactions to scientific progress and standard
fears drilled into us in school of what may happen if we let the
mad scientist have his way with electricity, atomic energy, fossil
fuels, lasers, genetic engineering, etc. So is Atwood against progress
and science? No. As she says in her web-site interview: "Please
don’t make the mistake of thinking that Oryx and Crake is
anti-science. Science is a way of knowing, and a tool. Like all
ways of knowing and tools, it can be turned to bad uses. And it
can be bought and sold, and it often is. But it is not in itself
bad. Like electricity, it’s neutral." Is she against testing
on animals – probably, given the link to PETA (People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals) an animal rights organisation which allegedly
funds or at least supports animal liberation campaigns and hunt
sabotage. Atwood is certainly concerned about the rate of animal
extinction caused by human activity which thereby, she believes
diminishes ‘God’s presence’ or ‘the expression of God’: "If
I were the Biblical God I would be very annoyed. He made the thing
and saw that it was good. And now people are scribbling all over
the artwork." (Yet what did He think about that meteorite which
wiped out the dinosaurs, or the millions of extinctions that naturally
occurred before humans evolved?)
But
then, she’s not averse to contradicting her argument, and although
her rejection of being ‘boxed’ is understandable, it is less acceptable
to permit and espouse a logical fallacy: Atwood allows the expression
of God through organic and inorganic matter (a pantheist
vision, which she outlines in her interview
and admits to not always understanding herself) but adds that only
when organic matter is destroyed is God’s presence thereby limited.
She
makes a couple of errors here: Firstly she argues that "The
forms of "God", both inorganic and organic, have since
multiplied exceedingly." But matter is neither created nor
destroyed. Its reformulation into different elements is another
thing – what exists, exists. Secondly, she argues that in destroying
matter (i.e., re-read as resolving organic into inorganic elements),
man is destroying God. That would make man greater than God – a
fallacy that St Augustine argued against somewhere in his City
of God, but forgive me for not having my annotated copy at my
side – and if we were that capable we could easily recreate matter,
which of course we can’t.
On
the one hand, she should logically argue that since matter cannot
be destroyed, the resolution of an organic body into inorganic compounds
does not alter God’s presence in the universe; or, on the other
hand, she should argue that only living matter can be deemed a reflection
of God’s presence in the universe, and hence the destruction of
a living entity limits God’s presence – this seems to reflect better
what she is claiming. However, the latter theory generates a host
of ethical-theological problems: taking an extreme example, one
could ask whether cancerous cells reflect God’s presence and should
be worshipped?
But
in her interview, Atwood retreats from reason and logic to embrace
a Humean vision of human nature – it’s not reason that guides people,
it’s emotion. Accordingly, if she feels that God is in both
organic and inorganic matter but is only destroyed when man (and
presumably not any other species?) kills organisms, then her feelings
must be respected. Nonetheless, here’s another glaring fallacy:
just because her feelings wish for X, and her statement is a true
reflection of her feelings, it is not necessarily the case that
X must be true. Such a position negates Aristotle’s basic law of
logic – the law of non-contradiction. Again, see Steven
Yates’s summary on this.
Moving
on with the literary critique: if we take Mises’s premise that all
human action is resoluble into ideas, then we can enjoy a more enlightening
read of Oryx and Crake. Rather than dismissing the book as
an anti-capitalist environmentalist tree-hugging novel riding on
the bandwagon of fears (real or misplaced) concerning genetic engineering
and global warming (and thereby labelling the book as generally
belonging to lefty anti-capitalist literature), we should pay attention
to the ideas motivating the characters.
Snowman
reminds me of Flood, the main character in my Wither
This Land (gee, plug plug again, well some one has to: I’m
self-published and don’t enjoy the benefits of a marketing agent!).
But
what befalls a man who has no ideas? … [Flood] pursued an image:
the man without ideas floats; he must be disconnected from the world,
which means that he is attracted to those closest to him. Perhaps,
another insight fluttered, in the battles that take place for the
minds of men, the thoughtless mimic the loudest – they fall in with
the crowd and flow with the current, whichever way it flows. They
do not really care which direction their lives take. (p.1)
Snowman
is a man without ideas – that is, he has no vision of how he ought
to live his life or what the good ought to be. He is accordingly
amoral (even though he sometimes reflects atavistic echoes
of older moralities) and, for Atwood, he is a slave to his passions
– specifically his sexual desires. His best friend, Crake, however,
apparently has a vision of what life and his role in it ought to
be: ‘apparently’, for both men grow up as products of their culture,
a culture that is very much embedded in our contemporary world.
Here Atwood is at her most enjoyable and satirical. As we gain glimpses
of their maturation, the two friends become products of a passive
consumerism, expending their intellect on computer games (Kwiktime
Osama, Three-Dimensional Waco, Barbarian Stomp, Extincathon) and
surfing the net for porn and real-time executions and euthanasia
(Noodie News, Hott Tots, and my disturbing favourite that Atwood
coins: nitee-nite.com). Oryx, whom they both meet later in life,
was in a child-porn web-cast they came across: her story is one
of a flight from poverty via exploitation – yet Oryx is relatively
more philosophical, or at least Stoical, about her fate than Snowman,
who rails against the people who exploited her. Thereby Atwood mocks
the consumer-supporter of the industry: Snowman the viewer is also
Snowman the consumer. Her past cannot be morally written off as
Snowman angrily would like to write it off, for after all, Oryx
retorts, it enabled her to leave poverty in Asia and to find work
in America and to be with him: such pitiable conditions become the
symbolic origin of the new poor huddled masses seeking freedom in
America.
In
snippets we learn more of Snowman’s relationship with Oryx, who
maintains a somewhat intriguing secretive life and thereby sustains
her independence in a world sold out to corporations: his love for
her is rent by a fiery jealousy of her previous life – surely the
sex was not real, he implores in his frequent digging into her past.
"All sex is real," she replies (p.144): a phrase that
cuts to the core of the darker, unthinking, impassive elements so
in ascendant in our culture. Continental philosophers are particularly
good at describing the relationships between viewer and viewed imbued
in television and now downloadable films and live web-cam broadcasts
– of the implied but contrived intimacy between the subject and
object; Roger Scruton’s Philosophy of Sex, is well worth reading
for a particularly engaging analysis of sexual morality and the
present decline of moral standards. "All sex is real,"
says Oryx – indeed, let us not forget.
Beyond
Atwood’s own confused metaphysics, there are problems with the logic
of Oryx and Crake. In any literary vision of the future,
jumps and omissions have to be made, but two strong assumptions
must be challenged (there are several but two will suffice here).
The first is a comment on one of the reasons the world ended up
in such a disastrous state:
"As
a species," says Crake, "we’re in deep trouble … Demand
for resources has exceeded supply for decades in marginal geo-political
areas, hence the famines and the droughts; but very soon, demand
is going to exceed supply for everyone." (p.295)
Of
course, this is Crake’s particularly bad understanding of economics:
but he is supposed to be the whiz kid genetic engineering innovator
who understands social dynamics. But nowhere in the book – or in
any regular environmentalist harangues about resource use and depletion
– are price rises mentioned. If a resource is depleted, its price
rises, thereby cutting consumption and giving an incentive to find
alternatives. Only indirectly, coming to Atwood’s support here,
could we say that the genetic engineering companies are spurred
on by resource consumption to come up with tailor-made alternatives
such as ChickieNobs and Happicuppa coffee and all the products to
appease humanity’s vanities – from breast implants to the next generation
viagara style pill BlyssPlus and Snowman gets a job working as a
PR-man for ‘AnooYoo’.
The
reversal or indeed rejection of Say’s Law (that supply creates demand)
is a common error in future scenarios that have humanity perishing
from having depleted the planet’s resources. (For a wonderfully
precise criticism of such thinking see George Reisman’s Capitalism.)
But then the ‘evils of business’ thesis is further propounded:
"The
best diseases, from a business point of view," said Crake,
"would be those that cause lingering illnesses. Ideally – that
is for maximum profit – the patient should either get well or die
just before all of his or her money runs out. It’s a fine calculation."
(p.211)
And,
of course, that is what the big bad companies get up to: producing
products that get people hooked into buying them. The underlying
assumption is that all consumers (the pleebs) are so incredibly
stupid that they cannot know they are being duped (although Crake
admits later that they’re not as daft as he was led to expect);
so, the implication goes, people ought to rebel against either the
evils of the corporations or the evil of human nature that would
forever return us to this predicament. We cannot be sure this is
Atwood’s view or simply the view of Crake, who begins to see through
the conspiracy; either way, it is a rather stale (circa 1920s) and
false indictment of capitalism. But the confused motivations running
through Crake’s enigmatic comments and silences also leaves the
reader questioning Crake’s ultimate motivations. Now requiring the
reader to think and reflect and to return to the narrative
is certainly the characteristic of a good book.
The
second problematic assumption is the genius of Crake. His upbringing
is intellectually sparse to say the least, but he possesses oodles
of natural wit and intelligence – this, we are led to believe, enables
him to become a renown and highly respected bio-engineering researcher.
Atwood takes him to the best university ‘Watson-Crick U’ (the Eastern
Sea-board universities having sunk in globally rising tides, as
has New York, which has since been rebuilt, no doubt in the upper
state as New New York), where he receives an excellent education
– but the shallowness of his intellectual culture is worrying for
the plot’s development.
Arguably,
this can be read as a point being made by the persistently elusive
and not always logical Atwood: Crake writes that his university
is populated by a
"high
percentage of brilliant weirdos that strolled and hopped and lurched
through its corridors. Demi-autistic, genetically speaking; single-track
tunnel vision minds, a marked degree of social ineptitude…"
(193).
(Interestingly,
I was lambasted by a tax-payer funded short dumpy warthog left-wing
screaming academic for being rude after giving a similar labelling
description of rationalists, who would wish to rule the world through
the computer screen as they do the Sim-city, Civilization, etc.
games, and whose shallow culture and lack of social interaction
does render them dangerous: don’t you just love irony?)
Crake’s
not far off social ineptitude himself, so he calls in his old friend
Snowman to work on his project to help balance his own lack, "I
needed someone to talk to" (p.306). Thus we are presented with
another mad scientist genius who threatens the world (if that’s
what Crake is up to: discuss). Of course the scenario of the computer
nerd rising to bio-engineering genius is not beyond human possibilities
– genius often lies hidden, but, as JS Mill noted, the intelligent
mind is an incredibly fragile entity that requires a fertile intellectual
soil to permit its flourishing: Crake’s sporadic surfing of the
web for marginally diminishing titillations doesn’t correspond with
the usual necessary fecund conditions for even later academic brilliance.
(There is a detectable passing reference to the recent film on the
alleged
genius of John Nash in ‘Beautiful Mind’: Crake possesses ‘an
elegant mind’ writes Atwood.)
Nonetheless,
swallowing the erroneous economic theory that sustains the global
disaster scenario (after all, Austrian economists have to do this
so often to enjoy the world of good literature), we are presented
with Snowman’s struggle to live. The situation is of a new Robinson
Crusoe (the reference is direct: he later discovers a foot print
in the sand even); Snowman is almost without assistance in a very
hostile environment: he forages in houses now being taken over by
nature’s foliage for remnants to sustain him. His life is constantly
threatened from infection and predation. In a previous conversation
between Crake and Snowman, Atwood offers a more lucid economic description
and clarification of what the loss of intellectual capital could
mean:
"Let’s
suppose for the sake of argument," said Crake one evening,
"that civilization as we know it gets destroyed … Once it’s
flattened, it could never be rebuilt." …
"It
could be put back together," said Jimmy [alias Snowman]… "They’d
still have the instructions."
"Actually
not," said Crake. "It’s not like the wheel, it’s too complex
now. Suppose the instructions survived, suppose there were any people
left with the knowledge to read them. Those people would be few
and far between, and they wouldn’t have the tools. Remember, no
electricity. Then once those people died, that would be it. They’d
have no apprentices, they’d have no successors … All it takes …
is the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything.
Beetles, trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever.
Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and
it’s game gone forever." (p.223)
The
interdependency of people through markets that produces today’s
hitherto never experienced levels of prosperity is a product of
freedom and of the vast intellectual capital inheritance of rules
and know-how generated as the division and specialisation of labour
expands. Destroy that link and Crake is right – that inheritance
and all of its benefits would be lost. St Augustine recognised that
the Eternal City of Rome would survive the temporary ravages of
barbarian hordes, because civilisation possesses deep resources
and a flexibility that shallow division-of-labour societies do not
possess. Crake envisages the more disastrous wiping out of the present
generation, leaving few if any survivors from a mass extinction
– and of course, civilisation, which depends so much on the intricate
ever-changing matrices of interdependent relationships, would be
destroyed.
The
apocalypse of Oryx and Crake can also be considered symbolically;
although Atwood’s vision is of a single dominating destruction that
is unleashed simultaneously around the globe, much of the novel
touches on the cultural forces that lead to the finality: and there
we return to the pluralistic cultural momentums that are slowly
cutting the strands both from our past moral codes that have until
now sustained our adaptation to an increasingly complex open society
and the knowledge and know-how required to understand firstly our
present use of resources and the potential for them in the future.
One of my characters quips to himself: "But death by a thousand
cuts: which one would kill you? That was what the land was suffering
from." Atwood’s cultural critique is appropriately broad, dipping
into many areas of contemporary life that we often raise objections
to. If ideas do enable us to direct our lives, the present lack
of logic (reflected in the author’s own thinking!) and the disparagement
of high culture (i.e., culture that requires brain activity rather
than the passivity of web-surfing), then the roots of civilisation’s
future decline and fall are presently embedding themselves amongst
the flowers.
Finally,
although the story is told from the perspective of those caught
up in the emerging but wholly unexpected apocalypse, the rebellious
figures, who dare to drop out of the system or challenge the direction
humanity is taking – Atwood’s usual characters – are what we would
characterise as eco-warriors or Greenpeace activists. They are the
present anti-GM lobby, the anti animal-testing lobby, or more generally
the anti-progress lobby. Their presence is whispered about – hinted
at – and their noble cause overshadowed by the great leap forwards
science makes and the unquestioning attitude of the Compound inhabitants
(backed by the execution of those who are caught rebelling) reminiscent
of the Stepford Wives.
 Despite
the logical flaws and aspects that would send the typical LewRockwell/Mises.org
reader up the wall – and others may find more in the science of
Oryx and Crake – Atwood continues to produce an enjoyably
broad range of imagery that lingers in the mind long after reading
her novels and hence earns her position in the pantheon of great
writers.
Enjoy
Oryx and Crake – be provoked – reflect – examine and criticise
– return to – enjoy and get riled again!
 August
15, 2003
Alexander
Moseley [send
him mail] has lectured and tutored in American, Canadian and
British Universities. He spent the last two years sampling the State-run
comprehensive system in the UK and now teaches privately. He and
his fiancée have formed a partnership, Classical Foundations,
to teach music and other subjects privately one-to-one in their
area. Dr. Moseley is an avid exponent of the ideals Rothbard outlines
in his Education:
Free & Compulsory. He is the author of A
Philosophy of War and the novel Wither
This Land.
Copyright
© 2003 LewRockwell.com
Alexander
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