By Laura P. Valtorta
Oryx and Crake, written by Margaret Atwood, is the first book
in her MaddAddam trilogy. The other books are The Year of the Flood and
MaddAddam.
All of Atwood’s futuristic fiction, including The Handmaid’s Tale, is
based on actual events, scientific discoveries, or articles in the newspaper. The
Handmaid’s Tale is based on a religious cult in New England that was
incorporated into the Roman Catholic Church in the 1970s. The women in the cult
wore funny get-ups and were unusually subservient to men. The Heart Goes Last is a
comedy based on a for-profit prison system, such as we often have in the U.S.
and Canada.
I read Oryx and Crake aloud to Marco as we
drove to Syracuse, NY last winter. One of the main scientific experiments gone
wrong in that trilogy involves a group of animals – “pigoons” – used to create
human organs. The altered pigs begin to take on human intelligence.
As we were driving, a biologist came on the radio explaining
rapturously about his experiments to create human organs using pigs as the
hosts. Marco and I looked at each other. We laughed. But how funny was this? I
knew that Atwood read scientific journals as she was writing her fiction. Her
father was a scientist.
Atwood’s purpose, as she explains in a recent New
Yorker article, is not to sway the reader’s opinion about what is
happening to the world, but to point out what is happening in science and
modern economy. She says that the reader’s opinion is what counts. Yet her
books (some of the best writing around) definitely express an opinion against
the controlling nature of corporations. Her characters suffer because of
environmental pollution. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the reason that
some women are enslaved is that they are fertile; the falling birthrate,
brought about by overwhelming levels of pollution, turns people against one
another.
It’s difficult to read Oryx and Crake and not walk away
with a hatred for large corporations. Atwood’s mistrust of them is obvious as
she paints a world in which profit, and the levels of society controlled by
corporations, become more important than human life and the health of the earth
itself. MaddAddam, Oryx, and Crake are human beings, intelligent and exploited,
who react to the evil around them. That evil comes from corporations. Atwood
makes this clear.
Atwood is the god of her fictional universe, whether or not
she cares to admit her power.
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