Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake and Flood

:1:

Here are my three favourite Margaret Atwood science fiction novels, in descending order of favouriteness. Of favourableness. Of favoricity.

My all-time favourite Margaret Atwood SF novel is The Blind Assassin. Not the whole novel, of course, but the 40%-or-so of it that is a Pulp SF yarn, supposedly written by one of the characters. Since my purpose here is not to discuss this novel in any detail, I’ll confine myself to quoting the following paragraph from the SFE3 entry on Atwood. That I am in total agreement with the views expressed in this paragraph can, at least in part, be explained by the fact that I wrote it:

Considerable sf content is also concealed in her Booker Prize-winning The Blind Assassin (2000), a novel whose conventional twentieth-century Canadian frame story of thwarted and secret-ridden family life is folded around a very extensive, and in many ways much more interesting science-fictional Pulp magazines adventure (after which the novel is named). Atwood's easy command of the pulp idiom contrasts sharply, and to interesting aesthetic effect, with the rather strangulated manner in which the contemporary half of the novel is narrated.

The Pulp idiom frees up Atwood’s treatment of her main theme—broadly, men’s horribleness towards women. I think one of things that makes The Blind Assassin work so well is the way the SF fable is positioned in relation to the ‘realist’ narrative—ironically, obliquely, and not (as in Atwood’s other SF novels) as a satirical extrapolation of perceived contemporary trends.

As this seems to me an important point, I’ll dilate briefly upon it before I go on. I’d say that two main forces are at work in much of Atwood’s writing. On the one hand, there is an extraordinary deftness of verisimilitude, a beautiful command of telling detail (physical and psychological) and the ability to write characters inhabiting their immediate worlds. Her writing in this idiom often feels very real—extrapolated from the actual world in ways that are, skilfully, metonymic; and related to this is the fact that she is most comfortable telling her stories via consecutive narrative. On the other hand, Atwood is drawn to the metaphorical, to the fable and the symbol, to poetry (in The Year of the Flood to actual poetry; I’ll come back to that later). Oryx and Crake (2003) is, amongst other things, a retelling of the Eden story, with a God-the-father (Crake), an Adam (Jimmy/Snowman) and an Eve (Oryx); The Year of the Flood (2009), as its title suggests, plays intertextual games with the story of Noah. This is all fine and dandy, except that these two axes, the metonymic and the metaphorical, are so often at odds. To read the latter by the former is to be struck by how poorly observed much of Atwood’s speculative detail is; and to read the former by the latter is to be struck by a tendency towards mundane agit-prop. By the same token, it is the speculative dimension of these two novels that makes them fly. The problem is that this speculative dimension is, by its nature, untrue. I mean this is a strict sense: there are no such things as pigoons. I know what you’re thinking (mind reader, me): but it doesn’t matter that it’s not strictly true! And I agree with you. Swift’s Laputa is ‘truer’ in an important sense than Zola’s Paris. But the tension, for Atwood’s writing, is the extent to which her art is able to commit to this. At one point in Oryx and Crake Snowman is trying to explain pictures to the Crakers. ‘Flowers on beach-trash lotion bottles, fruits on juice cans. Is it real? No, it is not real. What is this not real? Not real can tell us about real. And so forth.’ [Oryx and Crake,102]. That ‘and so forth’, that deflating addendum, is what gives me pause—does Atwood actually believe that not real can tell us about real? Or is she still, actually, of the opinion that the best way of communicating the real is with the real? It’s the question that goes right to the heart of metaphorical modes of art like SF.

My second favourite Margaret Atwood science fiction novel is The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). This, of course, is a book that has settled comfortably in the canon; still in print and selling well, still read, admired and widely taught, all of which (quite apart from anything else) would render praise of mine redundant. What makes it work, I think, is not its satire on US fundamental Christianity, or its first-wave feminist outrage, or its slightly schematic sfnal worldbuilding. It is the psychological subtlety with which Atwood renders the state of mind of Offred herself. Her horrible situation brings out of her neither despair, nor revolutionary fervour and anti-masculine hatred; rather she picks a path through a kind of poisoned complicity, triangulated between resentment, submission and a kind of dampened desire of her own (this is something the 1990 motion picture gets wrong, I think: Natasha Richardson plays Offred as a fierce-souled fighter, who ends the film by slicing the Commander’s throat in bloody revenge. Nothing so clumsy happens in the original novel). What this does is not only to say perceptive things about human psychology as such; it says important things about how structures of oppression are able to subsist in the first place, why it is that human beings downtrodden don’t (as Shelley puts it) rise like lions after slumber.

Not that it is a flawless book. When I first read it, yonks ago, my disappointment pricked at me with the scene in its latter half when the Commander takes Offred to a government-sanctioned nightclub-cum-brothel. Up until that moment I thought Atwood was doing something more complex and interesting in her novel than just sticking Hypocritical Maleness in the stocks to throw sponges at. I thought she was portraying a world in which men, having erected a forbidding theo-ideological edifice in order to keep women in their place, thereupon found themselves snagged in their own webs, their lives leached of the gratifications of power by the very strategies employed to seize power -- that is to say, made miserable (less miserable than the women they oppress of course, but still) by their own narratives of self-justification. But, no. Atwood’s vision is that men don’t actually get caught in the repressive hierarchies they erect; they’re all actually getting drunk and fucking whores in secret clubs. A thing that makes me go hmm. Hitler didn’t go back to his Berlin bunker to partake of cocaine-fuelled wild sex-orgies, after all; he went back to eat boiled asparagus and bore his companions with tedious speechifying before lying down on his truckle-bed to dream his arid dreams of Aryan dominance. One of the (many) expert touches in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is when O’Brien reveals the level of luxury denied to hoi polloi but indulged in by the Party higher echelons—and it’s desperately feeble; a slightly better brand of Victory Gin, a slightly less threadbare set of furnishings. That's better done, I think.

On the other hand, it has only recently occurred to me the novel’s famous naming convention for its enslaved women ('Offred' because she is ‘of Fred’ and so on) might be a riff upon the prefix-noun nature of Atwood’s own surname. Which, actually, is a rather cool thought. She may have missed a trick in not reserving for herself the twitter handle ‘@Wood’.

That brings me to my third-favourite Atwood SF novel, and the subject of the present essay: Oryx and Crake (2003) and The Year of the Flood (2009)—two novels that, for my purposes, I intend to take as a single text (the third book in this trilogy, Maddaddam is due out later this year). ‘Only third-favourite?’ I hear you ask, or I would, if the medication hadn’t eradicated all those booming voices-in-my-head. ‘Surely it deserves a higher ranking than that!’ And do you know what? It does. Indeed, before I go further I need to be clear: Atwood strikes me as a writer in the global front rank, a novelist of often breathtaking skill and reach. I’m of course aware of the tendency in some of the shires of SFland—my own home country—to sneer at her because she hasn’t pronounced the Fan Shibboleths with enough fervour. But this strikes me as not only the least interesting way of relating to Atwood; it seems to me to demean SF Fandom more generally. So she doesn’t want to write about talking squid in space. So sue her. As her career develops it is clear that she is as artistically committed to SF as to any other mode; and it would be small-minded to deny that she has written some of the most enduring SF-novels of the last four decades. Since what remains of this essay will revert, several times, to what seems to me wrong with Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, it is worth keeping this larger point in mind. Everything I say should be understood against the background of Atwood’s very many brilliances.

I know people who consider Oryx and Crake her greatest novel, tout court. And I can see why. It is a novel of genuine power. The two halves of Snowman’s story are told consummately, brilliantly: both his post-apocalypse, Robinson Crusoe existence as the last man alive (or so he thinks) and his pre-apocalypse backstory, the anomie of an affluent, troubled only child; his difficult mother; his adolescence; his unsatisfying adult life. All this rings true, and is written in an involving and often moving way. The other touch of particular genius in the novel, I think, is Oryx: her backstory—sold into sex-slavery as a child, trafficked around the world—is genuinely horrible, but Atwood characterises her as just sphinx-like enough to frustrate Jimmy’s, and our, desire for scenes of juicy post-traumatic sturm und drang. Jimmy, obsessed with her, probes and probes to uncover more excruciating yet titillating details of her former sexual degradation. She always, lightly, firmly, deflects his questions.

He couldn’t leave her alone about her earlier life, he was driven to find out. No detail was too small for him in those days, no painful splinter of her past too tiny. Perhaps he was digging for her anger, but he never found it. Either it was buried too deeply, or it wasn’t there at all.[314-15]

Jimmy is in thrall to what Žižek, in one of his better books, calls the ‘plague of fantasies’. Atwood understands this masculine urge very well indeed: that painful pleasure of agonising about a lover’s previous partners, the peculiar intensification of erotic desire predicated upon a kind of repulsed fascination, polluted in this case by the knowledge not only that Oryx’s past is one of rape and abuse, but that he, Jimmy, was indirectly one of the abusers—he watched the porn films made of Oryx’s predicament avidly enough. Now he wants to keep using her to gratify his sexual desires. It is a good call by Atwood to leave us, as readers, in Jimmy’s position: unsure whether her anger at the way she was treated is buried too deeply to be retrieved or just isn’t there at all. Our desire as readers is less venal than Jimmy’s, but by the same token it is more invasive. Of course, ‘we’ don’t want to have sex with Oryx, but ‘we’ do nevertheless feel entitled to a good rummage around in her most intimate being. Of course she’s only a fictional character; she’s not ‘real’ (actually I’m tempted to go with Snowman on this one: ‘“Mmm”, said Jimmy. He didn’t want to get into the what is real thing with Crake’, [200]). But that’s not the point. The point is bigger: namely, that representation, howsoever mimetic it may seem, always subordinates ‘reality’ to utility. Men getting off on internet pornography don’t actually think of the women they watch as ‘real—if they did, they’d be a damn sight more conscience stricken about watching the stuff. No, men judge them by criteria of ‘sexiness’, sexiness here being a strictly utilitarian category. The women are assessed only in terms of how useful they are in helping the male voyeur to crack one out. As a critique of porn this isn’t to say anything very original; but one of the more unsettling features of Atwood’s novel is its implication that all art works this way; that the literary novel is equally in hock to a kind of emotional-utilitarian voyeurism. The extent to which Atwood resists this reader-driven urge is one of the markers of what is excellent about her book.

I'd stick my neck out far enough to suggest that this is one of the things this book is 'about', too. Ursula Le Guin dislikes Atwood’s characterisation in this novel (saying the characters' ‘personality and feelings’ were ‘of little interest; these were figures in the service of a morality play’). I think she is dead wrong; that Atwood’s characterisation is constructed not to underplay reader interest but specifically, and pointedly, to rebut it. We pick up a novel expecting all the ins-and-outs of the characters’ motivations and feelings, their sufferings and joys (but especially their sufferings) to be laid out for us. With the character of Oryx, and to some extent with the character of Crake too, Atwood simply refuses to indulge us. And with the third of her trio, Jimmy, we get a aversion-inducing splurge of too much intimate knowledge: every seamy twist and turn of his early sex-life, Snowman wanking in a treehouse at the end of the world, Snowman slaveringly eyed-up as ‘fresh meat’ by those clever little chauvinist swine, the pigoons. And so on. One of the things the end of the world does, it seems, is turn the consumer of porn into, in a manner of speaking, the product. The subject is objectivised. But I’m getting ahead of myself.


:2: Oryx and Crake

The first thing to say about Oryx and Crake is that it has a great title. That choriambic rocking rhythm is, as the phrase goes, full of win: ‘Jekyll and Hyde’; ‘Morecombe and Wise’; ‘Watson and Crick’ – indeed, now that I come to think of it, that latter pairing may have been behind Atwood’s particular choice of title here.[*footnote 1] The two kinds of animal that name, or pseudoname, the leads fit their characters well: the gracile, exotic antelope (but with the fearlessness and the big, head-butting horns) for the woman, and the undistinguished, mostly ground-based bird, creature of omens and mysteriousness, for the main male. Then there’s ‘Snowman’, of course, who choses his name because he thinks his defining feature is his abominableness—such terrible things he has done!—when in fact his defining feature is his white, blobby sensitivity to heat and the fact that he will, unlike the Crakers, inevitably melt away.

The narrative starts with Snowman after the world’s end. He is the last human alive, or so he thinks; and Atwood is vivid and believable not only on his day-to-day shuffle to survive, but in his unlikely position as Moses to a tribe of (deliberately) bland, benign, genetically engineered post-humans called ‘Crakers’. In fifteen sections, each made up of between one and seven smaller chapters, Atwood tells us the story of Snowman’s life and adventures.[*footnote 2] This is weighted, roughly, one third Snowman trekking to find supplies, and then returning to the Crakers; and two thirds Snowman recalling his life before the apocalypse, when he was called ‘Jimmy’. Jimmy grew up in a gated community, whilst the world outside (designated by Atwood ‘the pleeblands’, which sounded less to me like land of the plebs and more like the people who plea, blandly—not to get distracted, though) goes to hell in a handbasket. Jimmy has a strained relationship with his mother, and doesn’t respect his father. Jimmy’s mother runs off to join an eco-terrorist group; later she is executed by the state. Jimmy befriends Crake, a rather austere though intellectually brilliant teen. They hang out together; they watch porn and executions online and play a series of computer games that sounded to me far too dull ever to attract the attention of actual teenagers—‘Extinctathon’, which tests your knowledge of the names of extinct animal and plant species! ‘Barbarian Stomp’ in which players pay-off great cultural achievements like Beethoven’s 9th against atrocities like Buchenwald! Never mind. With details like this Atwood isn’t accurately observing real teens. She is telegraphing her larger fictive themes—is the death of Art (something of which the Craker posthumans are, by design, incapable) a price worth paying for saving the planet from Extinction? I’ll come back to that too, in a moment.

This question of the rightness or otherwise of Atwood’s satirical extrapolation is important, actually. Some of the details here read as strangely prescient. This bit, for instance, anticipating the hideous TV I’m A Celebrity—Get Me Out Of Here phenomenon:

They [Crake and Jimmy] would watch the Queek Geek Show, which had contests featuring the eating of live animals and birds, timed by stopwatches, with prizes of hard-to-come-by foods. It was amazing what people would do for a couple of lamb chops or a chunk of genuine brie. [85]

‘Or,’ this page goes on, ‘they would watch porn shows. There were a lot of these.’ This is, obviously, accurately observed as per the taste of teenage boys—although, by the same token, it’s a pretty fish-in-a-barrel fictional notation. Teenage boys are interested in porn? You don’t say! Other elements seemed to me situated on the continuum between 'off' and 'wildly off'. Teens today are less interested in watching live executions than Atwood thinks, and they are more interested in watching grisly torture-porn of the Saw/Hostel variety (because, I’d guess, death seems abstract and remote to teenagers, where their own changing bodies fascinate and repulse them prodigiously). And in some respects Atwood gets it wrong in a way that would be understandable for a novel from the early 90s but which seems distracting for a novel from 2003—for example, in the future-world of these novels, paper books have almost all been replaced by CD-ROMS, which seems to me an, um, unlikely development.

Anyhoo, wading as they do through oceans of porn, Jimmy and Crake chance upon an Asian child who catches their eye. Later, improbably, this girl not only makes her way to America, learns English and gets educated, she also becomes Crake’s right-hand-woman and lover. Quoth The Reader: pull the other one, unless The Reader gives Atwood the benefit of the doubt and saieth to him/herself 'let's take this as one of those Hardyesque coincidences, or Romance conventions, with which the Novel As a Mode is so well supplied, and not get too worked-up about it.

By this time Crake has graduated from his top-drawer university and taken a top job as what Paul McAuley (who does this kind of thing better, to be honest) would call ‘a Gene Wizard’. Jimmy’s thing is words; he gets a crummy literature degree from a low-ranking school and ends up writing advertising copy. He also tries his best to sleep with every woman in—as I believe the American expression goes—the Tri-State Area, although as he gets older his hook-ups, um, dry-up. Indeed, I found myself wondering how Jimmy’s sexual promiscuity related to the larger themes of the novel. Conceivably it may go something like this: Capitalism (Atwood is saying) is promiscuously productive of things; but the stuff it produces is sterile, or worse actively poisonous, because the idiom of Capitalism, whether it is dealing with living organisms of inert commodities, is reification. Jimmy’s vie sexuelle is a barren business, and becomes increasingly so as he gets older, in order to reflect this larger, deadening cultural and social promiscuity. It is as if Atwood subscribes to a Lawrentian view that inauthentic sex is somehow worse than no sex at all because its currency is death rather than life (I, on the other hand, lean rather towards the position encapsulated by this exchange from Woody Allen’s Love and Death—Sonya: ‘sex without love is an empty experience.’ Boris: ‘Yes, but as empty experiences go, it’s one of the best’. I don’t think this is a line that has much purchase with Atwood’s fictional vision.)

The shorthand for the critical point I’m making here is: to what extent is Atwood engaging in an exercise of 21st-century neo-Lawrentianism? And I’m not sure the answer is very clear to me. On the one hand we have Jimmy’s drearily repetitive and unsatisfying sex-life. On the other we are shown the guaranteed joyful, life-affirming programmed-in copulation cycle of the Crakers, who signal their sexual availability by having their knobs and/or bellies turn bright blue. Is this a parody of Lawrentian authentic fucking? Or is it offered, howsoever marginally, as a genuinely preferable alternative? Crakers, after all, are incapable of rape, the sexual exploitation of minors or anything of those sorts of horrors that have so disfigured actual human history.

The problem with this, when we bring it back to the human characters, is that it tends to glob the novel’s otherwise subtle, sophisticated grasp of human desire and human disconnection back into the schematic agit prop of ‘21st-century life has leached all the joy from sex’. To be more specific, it encourages reader to engage in a kind of saloon-bar psychoanalysis. Viz., ‘Jimmy didn’t get enough love from his mum, that’s why he sleeps with so many women.’ Or: ‘Crake’s mum collaborated in the murder of his father and then married his uncle, so that Crake brews up a planet-killing superbug to take revenge upon the whole world exactly as Hamlet did before him.’ Putting it like this, though, rather points up the limitations of this sort of analysis.

Oryx and Crake is to do with parenting. I like the critical idiom ‘to do with’ for its saving vagueness, and in this case that’s the best way to approach the subject, I think—with, as it were, tongs. Jimmy’s relationship with his shallow Father, and his too-deep, damaged Mother, seemed to me well-drawn; although there’s no shortage of examples of that kind of thing in contemporary fiction, I suppose. His relationship with his stepmother is handled in a sketchier manner, in part because by then Jimmy has moved from being a child into debateable adolescent land between childhood and adulthood. His coup de foudre for the child Oryx neatly balances the immature selfishness of male sexual desire with a compromised but still, I think, genuine parental urge to protect. That this urge is all tangled up with guilty sexual desire is another uncomfortable truth that Atwood recognises.

In a rather hard-to-swallow plot development, Crake summons Jimmy out of his squalor, supposedly to write ad-copy for his revolutionary Gene Wizard work but in fact just to have him there to hang-out with. He inoculates Jimmy (and apparently no-one else—or did I miss something?) against the end-of-the-world plague that he has been secretly cooking up. Jimmy begins an affair with Oryx, anxious that he is thereby betraying his friend. The apocalypse happens quickly, and mostly offstage. Jimmy seals himself inside the Institute’s hermetic dome with the Crakers, and follows the end of the world on TV. There is a rather sore-thumb-ish grand guignol denouement, where Crake arrives at the dome with Oryx, let’s himself in, cuts Oryx’s throat in front of Jimmy and is then shot dead by him. The novel ends with a sort of coda, where Snowman treks back to the Crakers and discovers that other humans survived the end of the world after all. Atwood ends the whole rather cleverly without spelling out the implications of this statement.

The thing about DH Lawrence, I've always thought, is that despite being a priest of the new sexual liberation, and terribly earnest about overturning Victorian sexual repression, he was an intensely puritanical figure. I say ‘despite’; perhaps I mean ‘because’. The test of Oryx and Crake, it seems to me, is the extent to which it is able to ironize its own outrage. The Crakers, standing in a semi-circle and pissing to mark their territory, are noble savage, but of a rather absurd and manikin sort. Does their ridiculousness save them from the inertness of propaganda, or only make their status as the new man impossible to believe? To what extent is Atwood able to indulge in a fantasy of a world picked clean of all the horrible, raping men and vain women without simply channelling Pol Pot? The reader begins to wonder if she wasn’t being encouraged all along to condemn Crake rather as a New England Puritan might, because what he is about is Not Natural and Against God.

‘Those walls and bars are there for a reason,’ said Crake. ‘Not to keep us out, but to keep them in. Mankind needs barriers in both cases.’
‘Them?’
‘Nature and God.’
‘I thought you didn’t believe in God,’ said Jimmy.
‘I don’t believe in Nature either,’ said Crake. ‘Or not with a capital N.’ [206]

My experience of reading this novel was that Atwood treads a line somewhere between ‘commercial science got us into this mess, the answer is not more commercial science’ on the one hand, and ‘woe to those who blaspheme against the Natural Order!’ on the latter. Crake, for example (the textual creation of a female artist) has a theory that art is nothing more than male courtship display behaviour, like the feathers sprouting from a peacock’s arse. Jimmy asks: ah, but what about female artists? ‘Female artists are biologically confused,’ [168] is Crake’s reply. The irony here is neat, and several-fold. ‘Confusing’ biology, we recall, is ion a strict sense Crake’s whole professional ethos—all those pigoons and ratsnakes and gider/spoats. And a Babel-like ‘confusion of biology’ is what follows the wrath of the biological god of the novel’s end. Of course, another way of reading this is to see it as less ironic. After all, the story develops an idea as old as Mary Shelley that the male scientist who bypasses women to give birth breeds monstrosity and death. That has the smack of essentialism about it.

But none of this detracts from one of the novel’s great insights into Nature—that same Nature in which Crake disbelieves. The novel is about a lot, but it is centrally about the Green Man. The green man, nowadays, means the environmentally careful man—the man, in other words, who arranges nature around himself in as considerate a manner as possible. This, thought, is a one-eighty-degree swingabout from the older model, where the green man was Nature itself, hostile to humanity, mostly, and most of all inextinguishable. It’s sobering to think how condescending our view of Nature has become—how fragile we consider it to be. This is a mistake; not because humanity cannot damage Nature (of course we can) but because this susceptibility to damage does not mean that Nature is feeble. On the contrary. It is far stronger than we. The most we can do is make Nature ill (and we’re doing a pretty good job of that). But Nature can kill us. For Environmentalism to prevail amongst human cultures we will need to shuck off these sorts of blear-eyed muddle. Nature is not fragile. We’re the ones who are fragile.


:3: The Year of the Flood

This dry-flood novel is not only a much lesser fictional achievement than Oryx and Crake; it drags the larger project down. There are several reasons for this. Where the first novel was well focalised and paced, this one feels dissipated and disorienting. The shorter chapters and jumpabout points of view fray the effect of the whole. The re-treatment of the same themes rang hollower. So, where the systematic sexual abuse of Oryx (in the first novel) felt ghastly in a real way, the sexual abuse of Toby (she gets a job in a McDonalds-clone burger bar, where the owner, a fat, hairy ex-mafia goon, rapes his female staff during their lunch hours) felt ghastly in a cartoonish way. The one is a much, much more systemic (and therefore more real) problem than the other.

Part of the point, and I suppose one of the pleasures, of this second novel is the way it meshes with the reader’s memories of the first; such that s/he reads '[Toby] scanned with binoculars … a strange procession appeared. It seemed to consist entirely of naked people, though one man walking at the front had clothes on, and some sort of red hat, and—could it be?—sunglasses' [The Year of the Flood, 164] and goes, ‘oh! That’s the scene from near the end of Oryx and Crake!' Or in Flood LindaLee remembers dating Jimmy in High School, and writing ‘Jimmy you nosy brat I know your reading this in her diary [226], and the reader is sent scurrying back to Oryx and Crake to find the bit where Jimmy recalls reading his girlfriend’s diary and coming across that message. From comparing the one with the other we learn that having sex with LindaLee didn’t mean much to teenage Jimmy, but meant a great deal to teenage LindaLee (‘I loved being in bed with Jimmy, it made me feel so safe to have his arms around me’). Which, we might think, is not news.

I’d say that the pleasure of knitting the events related in the 2009 novel into the events related in the 2003 novel is a meagre kind of pleasure. I’d say more: Atwood revisiting more-or-less the same material in Flood dilutes the effectiveness of the whole. Much of the Flood slips, rather, under the reader’s whelm: the worldbuilding, the God’s Gardener’s cult, the satire. It doesn’t burn with life, the way Oryx does. It doesn’t really burn with anything. Fredric Jameson, in a very interesting LRB review, finds seeds of genuine utopianism in the God’s Gardeners cult and Adam’s dreary sermons. I put my telescope to my blind eye and declare: I see no such seeds. Jameson’s insightful, actually, on some of the book’s lamer aspects (‘the mark of the amateur here is topicality, among other things: in Flood, the reference to ‘the Wall they’re building to keep the Tex refugees out’, or the list of saints’ names – ‘Saint E.F. Schumacher, Saint Jane Jacobs . . . Saint Stephen Jay Gould of the Jurassic Shales’ etc.’). I suppose I feel that the lameness extends further than that.

To repeat myself: one of Atwood’s greatest strengths as a writer is her attentiveness to the way the world actually is. In Oryx and Crake that attentiveness generates some very powerful writing about growing up, and about how human beings get along when downtrodden, and about the natural world. But that same attentiveness seemed to me lacking in the actual satiric-dystopian aspects of Flood. Since the former thing is grounded in the latter, that’s an undermining thing.

An example of what I mean, indicative of a larger blindness, is in Atwood’s naming; or more specifically her naming of future-commercial products and organisations.. These names (some of these appear in Oryx, but there are many more in Flood don't get it right, glancing off versimilitude by that miss that is as good as a mile.:

CorpSeCorps
HelthWyzer
Bimplants
SecretBurgers
AnooYou Spa
SeksMart
Mo’Hair (artificial human hair, this, derived from sheep)

CorpSeCorps is the security arm of the Corporations who run this horrible future world; the name boiled-down from ‘Corporate Security Corps’. But this name telegraphs Atwood’s satiric disapproval in too lumpen a manner: they are the CORPSEcorps, see? Because late Capitalism is like a CORPSE, see? And its rotting stench and poison is polluting our world—see?

The logic is to take plain speech, roll it together and put a twist in it: HelthWyzer is supposed to look like a corporate tag implying wiser health choices, but misspelled like this it suggests instead illiteracy, idiocy, ‘hell’ and ‘wizened.’ ‘Bimplants’ are silicon breast implants that make you look like a Bimbo. Atwood’s McDonalds-equivalent is called SecretBurgers (advertising tagline: ‘SecretBurgers: because Everyone Loves a Secret’)—‘the secret of SecretBurgers,’ Atwood superfluously explains, ‘is that no one knows what sort of animal protein was actually in them’ [Flood, 33].

Now this is all fair enough, as far as the rather sophomoric level of inventing satiric commodity names goes, which isn't terribly far. But it clashes badly with the backbone of Atwood’s fictional approach, for it is very poorly observed. Corporations put a lot of money into finding the right name for themselves and their products. It is my contention that no rebranding committee or logo designer would come up with ‘Bimplants’. Cosmetic surgery often does turn its customers into bimbos; but its surgeons would not stay in business if they actually marketed themselves on that basis. No fast food company would foreground the vague suspicion its customers have as to the precise content of the product after the manner of SecretBurger. McDonalds have Chicken Nuggets; Atwood’s SecretBurgers sell ‘Chickie Nobs’. The former may indeed be thoroughly yucky as a product, but the name is carefully chosen not to suggest so, because the semantic field of ‘nugget’ is golden, and snuggle-it, and safe, and appealing. No fast food joint would market ‘nobs’, because the semantic field is knobbly and penile and nothing else.

I’m not saying that these are poorly chosen names from a satirical point of view—although they are all of them a little too clunking and facetious. It’s that they don’t fit Atwood’s larger aesthetic, which is, to repeat myself, one of persistent and truthful attentiveness to the world. Something similar is true of the youth gangs that roam the streets, the names of three of which are supplied by Atwood. ‘Asian Fusion’, which is borderline believable as a musical style, though not as a gang tag; ‘Blackened Redfish’ which is not believable on either score, and ‘Lintheads’, which is just barking mad. Atwood's acuity and eloquence about the natural world, and human interactions, jars badly with this stuff.

It could be that the problem here is that Atwood’s is trying to knead some of her, I’m sorry to say, underpowered sense of humour into the dough of the novel’s outrage and poetry. Not that there’s anything wrong with ‘funny’, even (look!--the Porter is opening his door in the middle of Macbeth!) in the midst of the darkest tragedy. The problem is that Atwood’s humour is so watery as to leave the reader unsure, often, whether it is supposed to be funny or not. In Oryx and Crake Crake shows Jimmy round the various experiments at Watson-Crick, rather in the manner of Mr Wonka taking those children round the chocolate factory:

First they went to Décor Botanicals, where a team of five seniors were developing Smart Wallpaper that would change colour on the walls of your room to complement your room. This wallpaper—they told Jimmy—has a modified form of Kirilian-energy-sensing algae embedded in it, along with a sublayer of algae nutrients, but there were still some small glitches to be fixed. The wallpaper … could not tell the difference between drooling lust and murderous rage, and was likely to turn your wallpaper an erotic pink when what you really needed was a murky, capillary-bursting greenish red. [Oryx, 201]

As an example of The Funny, or even of Harry-Potter-ish whimsy, this falls flat. And as a grace note on the novel’s worldbuilding or on Atwood’s polemic about the way men so often confuse sex with violence it clatters badly (‘Kirilian energy’? Say it aint so!)

Then there are the hymns, many of which are interleaved into the narrative, along with sermons from the Gardener’s head honcho Adam. Jameson, in the review above mentioned, thinks highly of these hymns (‘the Hymnbook deserves independent publication’), but I found them hard to stomach, on account of their remarkable and sustained shitness. In the endnote Atwood invites people to use these hymns ‘for amateur devotional or environmental purposes’, and namechecks Blake and the tradition of English hymnal writing, but Blake’s lyrics are mindblowing, and most English hymns have more technical-poetic nouse than these.

O Sing We Now The Holy Weeds
That flourish in the ditch.
For they are for the meek in needs
They are not for the rich.

The Holy Weeks are Plentiful
And beautiful to see—
For who can doubt God put them there

So starved we’ll never be? [Flood, 127-8]

Ugh, agh. Urgh. I found it hard to gauge whether the poems are supposed to be awful (a tricky play for a novelist) to reflect upon the clumsy limitations of the Gardeners’ theology more generally, or whether they’re supposed to be charming rough-hewn nuggets of beauty and wisdom, because Atwood secretly really likes the Eco creed she has invented. Blake? Really? They sound less like Blake, and more like Blakey from On The Buses. They lack true Blakeishness.


:4: Cleanness

For reasons unconnected to Atwood, I’ve been working recently (academic researching; not work-working) on the topic of ‘cleanness’. I mention this fact by way of explaining why one central problem I had with these novels struck me as hard as it did.

Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood are centrally about environmental collapse. That’s a serious business. In interviews, Atwood has described our present race to the abyss as a battle between the polluters and the scientists, the latter trying to find ways to undo all the damage humanity has inflicted upon the planet. Here, for instance (in the Grauniad, in 2010): ‘It's a race against time, because we're already overloaded with nine billion people. At what point do the people with pitchforks and torches come and burn down your lab? … Physics and chemistry. [The world] can't be sustained. The world is this big, and we can't make it any bigger. You can't put any more unrenewable resources on to it. There's a lot of hi-tech thinking going on. It's that trend versus Famine, Flood, Drought.’ Now, we might say that in the Oryx and Crake books, Science gets beaten around by the head by the Polemical Satire stick in a way that just isn’t true of counter-cultural green treehuggers cult God’s Gardeners, howsoever dippy this latter group are shown as being. We might add that this is because the Science in the Oryx and Crake books is exclusively at the service of Capitalism. It does not (setting Crake’s scorched-earth monomania on one side) propose any solutions to the continual degrading of the environment; instead it concentrates on selling beauty-treatments, comestibles and cures for diseases that Science has, secretly, invented Itself. My problem isn’t that this is a one-dimensional view of Science—it is; but a Polemic has no obligation to provide reasoned balance. My problem is that I’m honestly not sure how far these novels agree with Crake’s view that the problem for the planet is us. That take us out of the picture, and the environment stops collapsing.

Both these novels, and Flood in particular, present a portrait of homo sapiens sapiens that is not flattering. A few dedicated individuals aside, human beings, and most especially male human beings, are a cruel, short-sighted, dirty, vile, exploitative lot. Maybe that’s how we are, or many of us. But I find it impossible not to react against the notion that human beings are vermin. It’s not a notion that is born, fully armed, from the head of Environmentalism in the 20th-century. On the contrary. In the Guardian interview I just quoted, Atwood proposes the notion that concerns for ‘human rights’ ought not to get in the way of Green Reforms, on the grounds that ‘Go three days without water and you don't have any human rights. Why? Because you're dead.’ The word she uses to describe human rights in that context is ‘fatuous’. I can’t say this endears me to her. There’s a long political tradition of dismissing human rights as bourgeois irrelevancies in the face of one or other really really serious, I assure you ‘pollution’ or ‘ethnic contamination’ or ‘imminent disaster’ threats to The Folk, and it’s not a tradition to which you want to belong.

Homo sapiens is dirty, but the Crakers are clean. Atwood’s prose comes most luminously alive in the description of a natural world purged of humanity; and rakes thoroughly over the nasty sty when describing the myriad uncleannesses of humanity. All this, to go back to what I was saying earlier, is very reminiscent of Lawrence, whose fetish for a notional 'cleanness' that excluded humanity may have been one of the distant influences on this novel. I’m thinking of Birkin cooing to Ursula in Women in Love: 'Don't you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?' When I was an undergard, my lecturer (the excellent George Watson—not, I should add, the Cambridge George Watson: the much superior Aberdeen George Watson) read out that passage and then actually tossed the book away from him in disgust. His point was about the very close ideological connection between notions of 'cleanness' and fascism. We don’t have to look far in DHL’s work to find this connection spelled out. Witness the pasty bile of his letter to Blanche Jennings [9 October 1908]:

If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly, and a Cinematograph working brightly; then I’d go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them in, all the sick, the halt, and the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile me a weary thanks; and the band would softly bubble out the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’.

What really strikes me about this, actually, is not the ur-Nazism of the sentiment, although that's obvious enough. It's Lawrence’s inability to rouse any properly diabolic force of expression. In a writer that's almost a worse sin. Check out this famous letter, to Edward Garnett, expressing anger that his manuscript for Sons and Lovers was rejected by Heinemann (3 July 1912):

Curse the blasted, jelly-boned swines, the slimy, the belly-wriggling invertebrates, the miserable sodding rotters, the flaming sods, the snivelling, dribbling, dithering palsied pulse-less lot that make up England today. They've got white of egg in their veins, and their spunk is that watery its a marvel they can breed. They can nothing but frog-spawn — the gibberers! God, how I hate them! God curse them, funkers. God blast them, wish-wash. Exterminate them, slime. I could curse for hours and hours — God help me.

I rather suspect DHL has, sanctimoniously, decided to reserve 'fuck' only for purely sexual-descriptive purposes. An ounce of Byronic vim is worth gallons and gallons of this weirdly stifled, tame blather: as if DHL can't quite let go of notions of respectability enough to actually yell. It reads like a vicar performing the idiom of 'swearing'.

Atwood isn’t as buttoned-down as this; she’s not afraid of the f-word for instance. But she never lets anger get the better of her narrative voice either; and I wonder whether these two novels actually do find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up. Maybe that would be fair enough—after all, Megagrump and Great American Writer Vonnegut wrote Galápagos in 1985, celebrating a future world purged of the contamination of humanity. The difference, I suppose, is that though Vonnegut despairs of humanity, sometimes angrily so, he is never revolted by us, and accordingly never contemptuous or fascistic about us. Vonnegut didn’t think that human beings were vermin. On the contrary: the problem with human beings in Vonnegut’s novel is that they’re not verminous enough. Our problem is that we're too clever. (‘the only true villain in my story,’ he is clear, ‘is the oversized human brain’). Atwood, I think, doesn’t walk the same path. She can’t manage Vonnegut’s lightness-about-serious-things, or his irony either, although that’s a separate issue.

This, I think, is the heart of my problem. When Oryx and Crake was a standalone (when I first read it) it stood rather magnificently alone. But The Year of the Flood appears as an inseparable continuation of the same novel, and The Year of the Flood diminishes the earlier achievement. Thinking about the two books, by way of writing the present piece, I was struck by certain family resemblances between them and an earlier North-American ‘literary’ writer’s excursion into SF, Paul Theroux’s O-Zone (1985). There’s a similar vibe in Theroux’s novel: near future dystopia, rich kids venturing into dangerous badlands polluted by rampageous Capitalism. And O-Zone, ending with a new breed of human appearing, better suited to the new world—‘She saw him in a landscape like this. He was the new breed, an O-Zonian, a sort of indestructible alien—stronger than any Owner’ (‘Owners’ are the regular humans, here) [Theroux, O-Zone, 546]. More to the point there’s an unmistakable shall-we-say badness to Theroux’s novel. This old PN Review from the 1980s gets it right, and in doing so finds words that chime with the doubt Flood has insinuated into my admiration for Oryx and Crake: ‘astonishing in its leaden triteness … a futurist initiation fiction, with sub-1984 satire on the ad absurdum abuses in cancerous late capitalism and a preacherly insistence on values, especially the value of resilience and survival. It is a long novel and attempts a great deal, and might have achieved particular effects better if it had been less of a welter.’ Maddaddam, when it appears, might change my view; but as it stands, and talking about the larger novel this dyad constitutes, I have to say—well, yes.

Maybe I'm being unfair, though. The objection occurs to me, for instance, that I'm letting my own ideological preconceptions blind me to the larger merits of Flood. There's no stepping outside one's ideological preconceptions, of course; but it is both possible and desirable to be aware of them, at any rate. And bringing in Lawrence as a lens through which to read Oryx-and-Flood may be a simple misprison: I've no evidence that Atwood has any interest in Lawrence whatsoever. More, I share Frank Kermode's uncertainty with DHL. As he says in his 'D H Lawrence and the Apocaylptic Types' essay (in Modern Essays, 1971), it's hard to tease out the 'decadent' sex from the 'renovatory' sex in Lawrence's writing.

One cannot even distinguish, discursively, between the sex Gudrun desires from Loerke, which is obscene and decadent, and that which Ursula experiences with Birkin, which is on balance renovatory. It is an ambivalence which may have characterized earlier apocalyptic postures, as Fraenger argues in his book on Hieronymus Bosch. Decadence and renovation, death and rebirth, in the last days, are hard to tell apart, being caught up in the terrors.

Does a new world -- created in the burning out of sexual shame, in the birth from such an icy womb as in that of the last chapters of Lawrence's novel -- does such a world await the elect when the terrors of the transition are over? [Kermode, 164-5]

And that may be as good a point as any on which to stop.

---
Footed notes

[1] The more I think about this, the more likely it seems to me. Think of the scene at the end of the novel when Snowman comes back to the Crakers, and, for a heart-sinking moment, hears them saying ‘Amen’: ‘Ohhhh, croon the women. Mun, the men intone.’ [260]. Of course, they’re actually saying ‘Snowman’. ‘Oryx and Crake’ sounds like a Craker chant of ‘Watson and Crick’. The name of the university at which Crake develops his end-of-the-world skills, of course, is Watson-Crick.

[2] Why fifteen? Maybe no reason, except that Flood is also divided into fifteen sections, which makes me wonder. Given the OT intertextuality with which Atwood is playing on these novels, I wonder if it has something to do with the Jews? In Hebrew the number 15 is not written according to the logic of other larger numbers—not, that is, as "10 and 5" (י-ה, yodh and heh), because those spell out one of the names of God and we can’t have that. So 15 in Hebrew is "9 and 6". Passover starts on the 15th day of Nisan. Sukkot begins on the 15th day of Tishrei. Tu Bishvat falls in the 15th day of Shevat. Purim is on the 15th day of Adar. I could go on. I won’t, though. [Update, 14.3.13. From the author's mouth! The Jews, it seems, are not the reason.]