Brave New World/ Oryx and Crake

Margaret Atwood's Book Oryx and Crake reminded me a lot of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Science fiction type novels are not my thing but I can see that at the time Brave New World was written it had the ability to stir things up where as by the time Oryx and Crake came out I was all to desensitized to get overly excited about the book.

The other book that comes to mind is George Orwell's 1984. When I was reading it I was working in a Federal Government field office with a lot of other people and i was struck by how my experience matched the book 1984, maybe not to the same extremes was there was a since of a BIG BROTHER always watching.

David Perrings

I loved O&C, but have not yet read BNW. It's been on my mental list to check out for ages now along with We, but somehow they slipped by me. I love a good post-apolalypse / dystopian novel and so it will only be a matter of time before I get to it.

How do you feel about The Chrysalids? by John Wyndam? I liked it a lot, but still haven't read his more famous work Day of the Triffids yet.

Isn't Day of the Triffids a 1950's B movie ?

david perrings

Yes, Day of the Triffids is a better-than-average B movie. I think of it every time I go out in the yard to try to tame the Himalayan blackberries that are steadily gaining ground. Triffids, at least in movie form, was missing the social commentary of Oryx and Crake, 1984, and Brave New World. Bookmarque, can you tell us a bit more about The Chrysalids?

Brave New World is a bit gentler, I think, than 1984. One certainly gets the point about the emptiness of life under Big Brother, but the perennial wars were all so far away, it was possible to interpret them as fictions designed to keep the populace in line. I only read 1984 once, long ago, and hope never to read it again. The scene of the rats in the cage around the protagonist's head was too vivid and horrifying. It was probably the more effective novel.

Something about Oryx & Crake left me unsatisifed, and I'm not sure I can put my finger on it. It may just be that the world in that novel was almost as comical as it was horrifying. The boneless chickens are the image that has stuck with me most vividly - it was a brilliantly imagined scene, and a fair extrapolation from the way various commercial enterprises have been messing with nature. But I could never really suspend disbelief as I was reading.

The Chrysalids is a tale set in an unspecified time in an unspecified location where all mod cons have been eliminated & we've turned back to an agrarian society. Ancient myths and legends exist about our time and not all of them positive. I suspect the big apocalypse was nuclear related because the boogey man of the tale is the mutant. All forms of mutation are against god and scripture which tells us how a man should be formed. Mutants that survive and cannot be out rightly killed are shipped to the fringes - territory between the truly bad lands where no semblance of normal growth occurs, and the good land where normality is enforced. As that population grows and grows more angry, they start fighting back.

Meanwhile the protagonist has made friends with another child and discovers she has 6 toes on each foot. He doesn't say or do anything about it (all those scriptures pounded into his head don't quite translate to reality), but eventually she is discovered and driven out. But not before another, more sinister type of mutation is discovered and has to be dealt with.

An excellent commentary on what different pockets of humanity can consider normal above any other variation and what they will do to keep their particular set of blinders on. It's a little fantasical and vague in places, but you just have to give the imagination a kick for those.

I was really disappointed in Oryx & Crake. The science seemed really poorly researched, to me. Crake was just a tad too evil, like a B-movie mad scientst. And Oryx was the standard hooker with a heart of gold/tragic past. It would have strengthened the story to make the characters a bit more nuanced.

In its defence littlegeek, I don't think that Atwood intended to write a Science-based novel. She seems to have been more after the psychological after-effects of a human-created disaster.

I didn't focus on that aspect of Oryx at all. To me, her whole prior life was a question mark and I think a lot of it was pure BS fed to Snowman to give him something to be preoccupied by so that he wouldn't ask her about what she was doing in the present too much.

The Chrysalids sounds interesting, with a much more thoughtful theme than Day of the Triffids (at least the movie version -- movies often do eliminate a lot of the depth from the novels they're based on). Thanks, Bookmarque.

I agree that Atwood's main concern was not to get the science right -- a lot of the story leans more toward fantasy (for example, the purring humanoids). But I'm not sure the psychological after-effects of disaster was exactly what she was after. I think one of the things that disappointed me about the novel was the lack of psychological depth and nuance. It wasn't that the characters didn't behave in psychologically realistic ways. More that they weren't behaving in psychologically interesting ways. Another way of agreeing with littlegeek that I would have liked more nuance in the characters. They seemed a bit too standardized to me, too.

But I think Atwood wasn't really going for psychological nuance, either. What interested her seemed to be the potential for disaster if our current consumer culture, in which commercial firms dream up ever more ways to indulge people's impatience with inconvenience, however mild (for example, bones in chickens), as a means to amass more and more wealth. I think she wanted to show the potential for society to break down if this trend was taken to its limit.

The problem with dystopian novels is they tend to be rather cold, probably because the author lavishes creativity on the disastrous consequences to society as a whole, at the expense of character development. I think Brave New World and 1984 suffered from the same effect; nevertheless, they are classics. If Oryx & Crake had been shorter, perhaps the lack of character development would have been less of a problem.

Margad,

I have to agree with you about the coldness of dystopian novels, i think it is my main problem with this type of form.

David

Margad - spot on, she really ranks on the scientific community and the populace as a whole for their 'evil ways'. I rather liked the disjointed structure and the unreliability of our narrator. I think it helps put me in a similar emotional place as the characters; off-balance, confused and trying to come to grips with this reality.

Coldness is something that never registered with me and this novel because I felt that Atwood truly loved Jimmy/Snowman as her creation. He is sympathetic without being pathetic. And he's not wholly likeable which makes sympathy for him an even greater achievement for Atwood. Even the over the top Crake had a germ of humanity and goodness, so coldness didn't come across for me.

PS - The Chrysalids is a free download from http://manybooks.net/

I have it in a PDF format, but there are many to choose from.
Maybe I'll go look for Day of the Triffids now...