Margaret Atwood: Oryx and Crake

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON

As time moves on, so do our nightmares. In 1985, exactly in the middle of Ronald Reagan's conservative presidency of the United States, as Jerry Falwell-style fundamentalism was gaining ground, Atwood wrote The Handmaid's Tale, a kind of feminist Brave New World.

Now, as global attention focuses on the possibilities of genetic engineering and as we contemplate a future where corporations supersede nation-states, Atwood has revisited the future. Her vision - of razor-wired social division, global warming, corporate hegemony, and biological transgression and apocalypse - is all the more terrifying for its shadowy familiarity. The way she conveys it, we're just a minute or two away from that midnight toll, and so Oryx and Crake is also a devastating satire on the world as we already know it.

Atwood, whose mind is labyrinthine and whose imagination is gargantuan, plays with this micro-distance between the almost and the as-yet fantastical to create a world that truly feels credible.

Websites where teenagers can kick back after school and watch any manner of horrifying things in real time - nitee-night.com, an assisted suicide site; hedsoff.com and deathrowlive.com, playing live coverage of executions - certainly don't seem out of the question; grotesque developments such as ChickieNobs (like a chicken hookworm - "chicken breasts in two weeks!"), "pigoons" which grow foolproof human-tissue organs in a transgenic knockout pig host, and fun things such as Smart Wallpaper are still, as far as I know, only live on these pages.

The story revolves around the friendship between two teenage boys, Jimmy (later known as Snowman) and Crake. Jimmy, the narrator of this tale, is destined to become (perhaps) the sole survivor of homo sapiens sapiens, is a words guy, not a numbers person. So he's a disappointment to his father, a genographer at OrganInc Farms, which is one of the closed compounds where the elite live and work in competition with other similar compounds to move the human race ever closer to immortality.

Jimmy's mother is a depressive who increasingly resents her husband's work. One day she escapes, presumably to the Pleeblands, a badlands where everyone else lives in various states of chaos and uncertainty, or so it seems to those in the fascistic compounds. Jimmy's mother will be killed if the compound security guards, catch her (brainfrizzed, shot with a virtual bullet from a scatter gun). It increasingly seems to Jimmy that she has joined a rebellion of some kind.

Jimmy's father gets a new job at HelthWyzer (working on a development with the snappy logo "NooSkins for Olds"), a higher-status compound where most of the kids are borderline geniuses and polymaths. There Jimmy meets the boy who will become his only friend, Crake, who wears "dark laconic clothing" and "exudes potential, but potential for what?".

The boys hang out for a few years, long enough for us to see that Crake has a ferocious ambition and ability that Jimmy can't match. Crake excels at high school, gets accepted by the very best EduCompound - "what Harvard had been, back before it got drowned" - while Jimmy must slum it at the Martha Graham Academy, named after "some gory old dance goddess of the twentieth century" (the book is full of vengeful, cackling, gleeful asides of this sort).

By the time Crake offers Jimmy a PR job a few years later at the ritziest compound of them all, RejoovenEsense, it's obvious that Crake is involved in something that seems like the ultimate. But ultimate what?

Much of this amazing story is told in retrospect, by Snowman/Jimmy as he surveys what is left after Crake has had his way. He mourns for Oryx, his mysterious lover who also functions in the story in a number of merely symbolic ways, as a nature goddess or Eve figure, as unflinching truth, a kind of touchstone amid the grime.

Atwood is an iconoclast who in her representation of both apocalypse and genesis does not hesitate to brainfrizz religion, science and a homogenised world in which everything - almost - can and will be bought or used for entertainment.

Jimmy's blindness to what is going on around him is axiomatic, and perhaps the point of the novel, to put it crudely. If there is a campaigning note to Oryx and Crake it is surely crystallised in Jimmy's moment of understanding. "I listened," he realises too late, "but I didn't hear."

Bloomsbury, $49.95