Résumé
Résumé
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * The first volume in the internationally acclaimed MaddAddam trilogy is at once an unforgettable love story and a compelling vision of the future -- from the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments
Snowman, known as Jimmy before mankind was overwhelmed by a plague, is struggling to survive in a world where he may be the last human, and mourning the loss of his best friend, Crake, and the beautiful and elusive Oryx whom they both loved. In search of answers, Snowman embarks on a journey -- with the help of the green-eyed Children of Crake -- through the lush wilderness that was so recently a great city, until powerful corporations took mankind on an uncontrolled genetic engineering ride. Margaret Atwood projects us into a near future that is both all too familiar and beyond our imagining.
Critiques (5)
Critique du Publishers Weekly
Atwood has visited the future before, in her dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale. In her latest, the future is even bleaker. The triple whammy of runaway social inequality, genetic technology and catastrophic climate change, has finally culminated in some apocalyptic event. As Jimmy, apparently the last human being on earth, makes his way back to the RejoovenEsencecompound for supplies, the reader is transported backwards toward that cataclysmic event, its full dimensions gradually revealed. Jimmy grew up in a world split between corporate compounds (gated communities metastasized into city-states) and pleeblands (unsafe, populous and polluted urban centers). His best friend was "Crake," the name originally his handle in an interactive Net game, Extinctathon. Even Jimmy's mother-who ran off and joined an ecology guerrilla group when Jimmy was an adolescent-respected Crake, already a budding genius. The two friends first encountered Oryx on the Net; she was the eight-year-old star of a pedophilic film on a site called HottTotts. Oryx's story is a counterpoint to Jimmy and Crake's affluent adolescence. She was sold by her Southeast Asian parents, taken to the city and eventually made into a sex "pixie" in some distant country. Jimmy meets Oryx much later-after college, after Crake gets Jimmy a job with ReJoovenEsence. Crake is designing the Crakers-a new, multicolored placid race of human beings, smelling vaguely of citron. He's procured Oryx to be his personal assistant. She teaches the Crakers how to cope in the world and goes out on secret missions. The mystery on which this riveting, disturbing tale hinges is how Crake and Oryx and civilization vanished, and how Jimmy-who also calls himself "the Snowman," after that other rare, hunted specimen, the Abominable Snowman-survived. Chesterton once wrote of the "thousand romances that lie secreted in The Origin of Species." Atwood has extracted one of the most hair-raising of them, and one of the most brilliant. (May 6) Forecast: Readers who know Atwood primarily as the author of The Handmaid's Tale will be thrilled by this return to the future; those who follow her work more closely will be even more impressed. This is a potential dystopian classic and should sell accordingly. Author tour. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Critique de Booklist
Surely Atwood deserved a respite after The Blind Assassin (2000) won the Booker Prize, but the muse had more to say, hence this hijack-intense speculative novel, sister to one of Atwood's most indelible works, The Handmaid's Tale (1985). Jimmy is struggling to stay alive on a wreckage-littered Earth besieged by a brutal sun and overrun with smart and vicious test-tube-bred predators. Now calling himself Snowman (as in Abominable), he's preparing for an arduous scavenger expedition back to the formerly high-tech compound in which he lived and worked until the bioengineering industry ran amok and a catastrophic event put an end to civilization. Snowman is desperately lonely, but he isn't actually alone since he serves as guru for a strangely passive tribe unaware of the lost world of computers, bullet trains, Web porn, gene-splicing, and the plagues that Snowman so vividly and regretfully recalls. As Snowman remembers his friend, Crake, an emotionally remote genius, as well as the love of Snowman's life, an enigmatic survivor of childhood sexual abuse called Oryx, Atwood conjures a grim, all-too-plausible future in order to consider the possibly devastating consequences of our present ill-advised biotech pursuits. Rigorous in its chilling insights and riveting in its fast-paced "what if" dramatization, Atwood's superb novel is as brilliantly provocative as it is profoundly engaging. --Donna Seaman
Critique du Guardian
From the very beginning of this novel, you feel that you are setting out on a journey masterminded by a sure and energetic guide. The starting place is a point some way into the future, where a character called Snowman is contemplating the devastated landscape around him and his own situation as probably the last human left on earth. Woven through Snowman's struggles to survive among genetic mutations and in the face of gradual starvation is the tale of his past as a naive young man called Jimmy. Jimmy watches as the world hurtles towards a catastrophe that is masterminded by his friend, an over-ambitious scientist called Crake. Although the structure sounds complicated, the novel never loses its forward momentum. Throughout the book the wheels of the plot turn relentlessly; sometimes you feel almost breathless. Will Jimmy reveal how the great biological disaster was released? Will Snowman survive starvation, injury, and attack by mutant monster pigs? It is a cracking read, in other words. But Oryx and Crake lacks some of the subtler imaginative power of Atwood's previous novel set in a dystopian future, The Handmaid's Tale , which was full of convincing detail and had an individual heroine. Oryx and Crake is, by comparison, a more derivative vision. Here too Atwood is putting across a relevant and intelligent political message, which can easily be summed up: don't trust the scientists and the big corporations to run the world. Before catastrophe strikes, the main features of Jimmy's world are based on the gradual exaggeration of some of the most dismal current trends in western society - internet pornography, gated communities, genetic modification. Atwood certainly has a lot of fun imagining the havoc that might be wreaked on the gene pool if scientists were constrained by nothing except the profit motive, with her pigoons (a combination of pig and human genes), wolvogs (wolf and dog), snats (snake and rat) and ChickieNobs (mutations of chickens that are all breast and no brain). Genetic tinkering reaches its apogee in the perfect human-oid creatures that Crake creates as better alternatives to humans, with their skins resistant to ultraviolet light and little interest in sex or violence. She has clearly done her homework on what scientists are getting up to in their crazier moments. Indeed, one of the characteristics of Atwood's recent novels is the sense that they are based on thorough research. Her latest books have mined past eras for their setting - the 19th century for Alias Grace , or 1930s Canada for The Blind Assassin . Sometimes the homework shows through too obviously. For instance when the young Jimmy is introduced to the pigoons, even though he is a child at the time, Atwood's style bypasses childish wonder for the rat-tat-tat of straight explanation: "The goal of the pigoon project was to grow an assortment of foolproof human-tissue organs . . . that would transplant smoothly and avoid rejection, but would also be able to fend off attacks by opportunistic microbes and viruses . . . A rapid-maturity gene was spliced in so the pigoon kidneys and livers and hearts would be ready sooner . . ." This kind of brusque tone often recurs . Indeed, although Atwood is one of the most impressively ambitious writers of our time, she is not our greatest stylist. If you compare her prose to that of, say, Donna Tartt or Zadie Smith, it will always seem curiously underworked. She wants to get ideas across to you, not to spend her energy polishing the sentences. Sometimes this means that she lapses into a style that is simply a vehicle for imparting information, and although it is useful for a tale set in the future, in which there is inevitably so much to observe and elucidate, it can begin to grate. The narrative voice becomes almost like a tour guide, always there at your elbow, to explain and clarify. Still, from time to time Atwood does delve more deeply into Jimmy's mind. She is rightly celebrated for her explorations of the female point of view, but here she manages to write convincingly from the point of view of a man - and a man, what's more, brought up in an emotionally stunted environment saturated with pornography and commercialism. Jimmy comes rather poignantly alive, especially in the parts of the novel that deal with his unhappy childhood and his relationship with his depressed and rebellious mother. It is good that he does achieve a certain depth, because he is the only fully realised character whom we meet. Jimmy's friend Crake, who harbours dreams of scientific experimentation that finally take the whole world as a laboratory, should be a crux of the novel, but he is never more than a vehicle for the plot. Perhaps he has to be rather inhuman and unsympathetic to fill this role as an updated Frankenstein, but he remains a shadowy figure to the very end. And what strikes the novel's only really duff note, oddly, is its main female character, Oryx. Oryx is Jimmy's wet dream - indeed, he first glimpses her as a child on an internet porn site: "She was small-boned and exquisite, and naked like the rest of them, with nothing on her but a garland of flowers and a pink hair ribbon . . . The act involved whipped cream and a lot of licking. The effect was both innocent and obscene." After she has met Jimmy in the flesh, Oryx gets the chance to tell him some of her own story, how as a child she was sold into slavery in some south-east Asian country, and then reached freedom in north America; but she always evades showing emotion, and is never more than a beautiful blank. "'Did they rape you?' Jimmy asks at one point. 'Why do you want to talk about ugly things?' she said. Her voice was silvery, like a music box." No doubt this shiny blankness is deliberate, making Oryx an ambiguous figure who hovers between reality and fantasy, but the effect is as bland as candy- floss. Even her violent end takes place with a curious lack of effect. Although Atwood stays so much on the surface of her creations in this novel, she is always intelligent and energetic in the way that she puts the jigsaw together - and, at the end, threatens to dismantle it. As the strange humanoid creatures that Crake has put on earth begin to show something approaching human individualism, the suggestion of another future for the world opens up. Whether it is a hopeful future, or just another way into disaster, is something that is left intriguingly shrouded in mystery. Natasha Walter is the author of The New Feminism (Virago). To order Oryx and Crake for pounds 14.95 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. Caption: article-atwood.1 It is a cracking read, in other words. But Oryx and Crake lacks some of the subtler imaginative power of [Margaret Atwood]'s previous novel set in a dystopian future, The Handmaid's Tale , which was full of convincing detail and had an individual heroine. Oryx and Crake is, by comparison, a more derivative vision. Here too Atwood is putting across a relevant and intelligent political message, which can easily be summed up: don't trust the scientists and the big corporations to run the world. Before catastrophe strikes, the main features of [Jimmy]'s world are based on the gradual exaggeration of some of the most dismal current trends in western society - internet pornography, gated communities, genetic modification. Atwood certainly has a lot of fun imagining the havoc that might be wreaked on the gene pool if scientists were constrained by nothing except the profit motive, with her pigoons (a combination of pig and human genes), wolvogs (wolf and dog), snats (snake and rat) and ChickieNobs (mutations of chickens that are all breast and no brain). Genetic tinkering reaches its apogee in the perfect human-oid creatures that Crake creates as better alternatives to humans, with their skins resistant to ultraviolet light and little interest in sex or violence. She has clearly done her homework on what scientists are getting up to in their crazier moments. Indeed, one of the characteristics of Atwood's recent novels is the sense that they are based on thorough research. Her latest books have mined past eras for their setting - the 19th century for Alias Grace , or 1930s Canada for The Blind Assassin . Sometimes the homework shows through too obviously. For instance when the young Jimmy is introduced to the pigoons, even though he is a child at the time, Atwood's style bypasses childish wonder for the rat-tat-tat of straight explanation: "The goal of the pigoon project was to grow an assortment of foolproof human-tissue organs . . . that would transplant smoothly and avoid rejection, but would also be able to fend off attacks by opportunistic microbes and viruses . . . A rapid-maturity gene was spliced in so the pigoon kidneys and livers and hearts would be ready sooner . . ." - Natasha Walter.
Critique de Kirkus
Environmental unconcern, genetic engineering, and bioterrorism have created the hollowed-out, haunted future world of Atwood's ingenious and disturbing 11th novel, bearing several resemblances to The Handmaid's Tale (1985). Protagonist Jimmy, a.k.a. "Snowman," is perhaps the only living "remnant" (i.e., human unaltered by science) in a devastated lunar landscape where he lives by his remaining wits, scavenges for flotsam surviving from past civilizations, dodges man-eating mutant predators, and remembers. In an equally dark parallel narrative, Atwood traces Jimmy's personal history, beginning with a bonfire in which diseased livestock are incinerated, observed by five-year-old Jimmy and his father, a "genographer" employed by, first, OrganInc Farms, then, the sinister Helthwyzer Corporation. One staggering invention follows another, as Jimmy mourns the departure of his mother (a former microbiologist who clearly foresaw the Armageddon her colleagues were building), goes through intensive schooling with his brilliant best friend Glenn (who renames himself Crake), and enjoys such lurid titillations as computer games that simulate catastrophe and global conflict (e.g., "Extinctathon," "Kwiktime Osama") and Web sites featuring popular atrocities (e.g., "hedsoff.com"). Surfing a kiddie-porn site, Jimmy encounters the poignant figure of Oryx, a Southeast Asian girl apprenticed (i.e., sold) to a con-man, then a sex-seller (in sequences as scary and revolting as anything in contemporary fiction). Oryx will inhabit Jimmy's imagination forever, as will the perverse genius Crake, who rises from the prestigious Watson-Crick Institute to a position of literally awesome power at the RejoovenEsense Compound, where he works on a formula for immortality, creates artificial humans (the "Children of Crake"), and helps produce the virus that's pirated and used to start a plague that effectively decimates the world's population. And Atwood (The Blind Assassin, 2000, etc.) brings it all together in a stunning surprise climax. A landmark work of speculative fiction, comparable to A Clockwork Orange, Brave New World, and Russian revolutionary Zamyatin's We. Atwood has surpassed herself. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Critique du Library Journal
A number of ecological and scientific disasters result in a future where cloning is commonplace, gene manipulation runs amuck, and social inequality becomes the norm. Eventually, chaos reigns, modern society destroys itself, and the world reverts to its precivilization history by means of a scientifically created tribe called the Crakers. Playing with language, Atwood makes up words and phrases, with homeroom becoming hoodroom, parents becoming parental units, raccoons and skunks racunks, and pigs pigoons. These tapes are professionally produced, with no background noise or tape hiss. Campbell Scott's flawless and well-paced delivery, combined with his wide range of tonal variations, assists the listener in tracking the various characters and adds to the overall ambiance of the story. Working on many levels, this is a thought-provoking yet frighteningly prescient tale. Recommended for public and academic libraries.-Laurie Selwyn, Grayson Cty. Law Lib., Sherman, TX(c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.