The basic plot of Margaret Atwood's dystopian blockbuster - a leading biochemist is secretly an eco-warrior with a master plan to save the planet by wiping out the human race - has already been used, arguably to better effect, by Tom Clancy in Rainbow Six. Atwood's version is just as readable, and more elegantly written, but nevertheless it contrives to be at once sillier and less funny.
Jimmy, a former advertising copywriter, finds himself living up a tree somewhere on the US East Coast, about half a century from now. As a result of the viral catastrophe engineered by his brilliant, if misguided, boyhood friend Crake, Jimmy is the last man left alive on earth, or at any rate the last man on this bit of seaboard, apart from the "Crakers", a small group of placid, genetically-modified humans that Crake has developed to repopulate the world in a sustainable manner.
Jimmy's survival is not an accident. Crake surreptitiously dosed him with a vaccine against the super-Ebola GM virus, making him as immune as the Crakers themselves. The Crakers can't stay in the bubble-dome of artificial forest at Crake's corporate HQ, because the power supply has shut down along with the rest of civilisation-as-we-know-it. Someone has to help them adjust to life on the outside. Crake, it seems, was not prepared to face the consequences of his actions, and bequeathed the responsibility to Jimmy.
As Jimmy is not modified to exist on grass and leaves like the Crakers, he is at constant risk of starvation. He decides, not for the first time, to make the dangerous trek back through the nearby city to the Crake complex and raid the place for more supplies. The danger arises from all the GM animals on the loose. The pigs, developed as organ donors, can be just as fearsome as the attack dogs, developed for corporate security purposes. The Crakers have pheromones that ward off predators, but Jimmy is not so blessed. Worse, he has no more "virtual bullets" for his "spraygun" and he's never managed to find an old-fashioned, lead-bullet gun lying around either.
As he goes along, we are told Jimmy's story in flashback. He and Crake both grew up in the "Compounds", the sealed-off luxury enclaves for the technocratic elite, as opposed to the "pleeblands" (presumably a comical distortion of "pleblands"), the seamy cities where everyone else made do. (Your standard science-fiction shtick.) This is a society with no books and little culture to speak of, just porn and cheap thrills, such as "deathrowlive.com" (executions on webcam), and bastardised science; luminous green rabbits, the product of some idiotic GM enterprise, have been a common sight ever since Jimmy was little.
Not being specially bright by Compound standards, Jimmy ended up at a run-down college for the liberal arts, which "was like studying Latin or bookbinding: pleasant to contemplate in its way, but no longer central to anything", whereas Crake went to the cutting-edge Watson-Crick institute, the top academy for mad scientists.
On a visit to Watson-Crick, Jimmy recalls seeing one of the students' experiments: "a large bulblike object that seemed to be covered with stippled whitish-yellow skin. Out of it came twenty thick fleshy tubes, and at the end of each tube another bulb was growing."
This is the ChickieNob, a kind of GM chicken on "the sea-anemone body plan", which produces only breast meat. Jimmy "couldn't see eating a ChickieNob. It would be like eating a large wart." A few years later, however, he was ordering ChickieNob Nubbins takeaways with- out a thought.
The ChickieNob is a memorably nightmarish image, somewhat undercut by Atwood's quaint notion that research scientists would be involved in marketing. "They've already got the takeout franchise operation in place," Crake explains. Much of the book is a satire on the excesses of big business, but it shows scant understanding of, or interest in, the way big business works. As with all the material about climate change, designer babies, the decline of literacy, the gulf between the haves and have-nots, the obsession with youth and so on, it merely reflects the general anxiety that many people get from paying too much attention to what they read in the papers. It doesn't offer any genuinely original perceptions.
Sorry? Who's Oryx? Oh, Oryx is Jimmy's lost love. She's already dead at the start of the book, so there isn't a great deal of scope for development there. In the flashbacks, however, she appears as a charming, enigmatic personality: the only character, apart from Jimmy's troubled mother, to exhibit more depth than this simplistic fable strictly requires.
