One Negative Book Review

Excessive Candour

Croaked


By John Clute

from http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue325/excess.html


It was good luck that I began to read Margaret Atwood's new SF novel on an international flight, because there was little else to do, seven miles above Newfoundland, 200 pages of arthritic backstory already caught in the throat, no end in sight and hardly a glimpse of Oryx, except to continue turning the page. So the book remained open, and we reached page 216, and Atwood, who had clearly been taking the capsules, suddenly calmed down enough to begin to tell the archaic First SF story she had been pretending she was never going to have to bend her brow to, even though she never did leave backstory till the last few pages (see below for comments on trahison des clercs). Oryx and Crake may be the kind of SF contemporary writers stopped committing to print after 1970 or so, and Atwood may have told her ancient tale in a priggish atonal drone that sounded rather, as P.G. Wodehouse once famously said, "like an Englishman about to talk French"—but hey, she got to the end, and so did the reader. With a bump and a grind and a whine of great engines in reverse, we did all land safely, after a fashion.

Trahison des clercs is a term which has escaped the narrow political intentions of its coiner, the right-wing theologue Julien Benda, and is now commonly used to describe almost any sort of intellectual treachery on the part of that class—the "clercs" or clerisy, the guardians and disseminators of higher culture—one of whose obligations is to tell the truth. It may be a bit high-sounding to describe what Margaret Atwood has said about Oryx and Crake in various interviews as manifestations of the trahison des clercs, but, in their own small priggish way, these interviews are, in fact, pretty offensive.

In an extremely well-argued Locus review of Oryx and Crake, Gary K. Wolfe treats Atwood's claims—that she does not write SF, that Oryx and Crake is not SF at all because SF is "about spaceships" and squiggly things, and that she writes "speculative fiction" instead, though without mentioning Robert A. Heinlein, who first used that term half a century ago—as quite possibly representing a natural aversion to the less attractive aspects of genre marketing; that "she's not demeaning the SF market so much as protecting the Atwood market." I believe this is almost certainly the case. But words do have consequences, even words Atwood well may have taken down verbatim from the publisher and parroted. Atwood's utterances, made in public to the world, are palpably untrue or misleading, and every slurry in the face of honest discourse damages that fragile world, even untruths about forms of literature. More to the final point of this review, it is possible to say as well that, insofar as her utterances manifest an interior occlusion of intellect, they help explain the abjectly bad bits of Oryx and Crake, the sclerotic exiguity of its backstory, the miserly belatedness of the future it depicts.

The future is not now, and perhaps never was

We do not ever find out exactly when Oryx and Crake's protagonist, who calls himself Snowman, begins to try to put in order his memories of watching other people cause the end of the rest of the human race on extremely time-honored SF lines, but one's best guess is that Snowman—short for Abominable Snowman—may begin his ruminations only a few months after the climax of the novel (remember, everything that really happens in Oryx and Crake happens in backstory, and is distanced into a kind of weakly ironized hearsay). So the deserted, ruined world Snowman walks through may be only 30 or 40 years into our future. Certainly it's the case that his memories of his early life sound as though Atwood thinks of him as growing up round about 2010, somewhere on the eastern seaboard of North America, though locations are left as unspecific as the years. The only city given a name is New York, though by the moment of final collapse the city is known (lamely) as New New York, presumably because of the upheavals caused by the rising sea (Atwood never specifies). And it is here, in her descriptions of the world snowman experiences as a child, that we begin to sense the costs to Atwood's text of her occluded take on what she is actually writing.

Young Snowman grows up in a company-town gated community surrounded by "pleeblands" where all the non-privileged live in squalid tenements. His family is dysfunctional. Dad commutes daily to his job with an ominous biotech firm, Ma goes increasingly rancid from disuse, and Snowman sneaks peeks at the Net with his schoolmate, the brilliant young Crake, whom he adores. The dysfunctional nuclear family reminds one of Sloan Wilson (or Rock Hudson). The satire on consumption-based admass capitalism, replete with appalling fake brand names, reminds one of Kurt Vonnegut or Frederik Pohl or Shepherd Mead in 1955; fatally, Oryx and Crake does not homage any more recent satirical take on modern life. The gated communities are pale shadows of the "keeps" adumbrated in the 1940s by Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore and brought brilliantly up to date in The Song of the Earth (2001) by Hugh Nissensen—a writer, like Atwood, not usually associated with SF; but one, unlike Atwood, who proved capable of doing his homework (we will return to homework in a minute). The pleeblands (an astonishingly inept formulation, which might have been marginally improved, and certainly made easier to subvocalize, had she spelled it correctly) are out of any of a dozen Ace Doubles from around 1960, maybe by John Brunner or Robert Silverberg or Philip K. Dick when they were beating pulp between spasms of genius. And Atwood's vision of the future of the Internet has to be experienced to be believed:


When they weren't playing [seriously old-fashioned computer] games they'd surf the Net—drop in on old favourites, see what was new. They'd watch open-heart surgery in live time, or else the Noodie News. ... Or they'd watch animal snuff sites, Felicia's Frog Squash and the like. ... Or they'd watch dirtysockpuppets.com, a current-affairs show about world political leaders. ... Or they might watch hedsoff.com, which played live coverage of executions. ... Shortcircuit.com, brainfrizz.com, and deathrowlive.com were the best; they showed electrocutions and lethal injections....

"What is this shit?" said Crake. "Channel change!"


And so on, and it becomes increasingly clear that Atwood's got something deeply wrong here—that she's satirizing yesterday in the language of the day before yesterday, 1990 in the language of 1960; and that she's not taking her sci-fi potshots at the Net at all, but at cable television.

So, in the end, Atwood is absolutely correct when she claims not to be writing SF, if by SF in this context we are meant to understand novels set in the near future by writers like Bruce Sterling or Brian Stableford or Ted Chiang or Terry Bisson or William Gibson or Neal Stephenson or Don DeLillo, whose brilliant, savagely misunderstood Cosmopolis (2003), though set in 2000, occupies an information-radiated world far closer to the fractal edge of the actual present tense than Atwood's wooden-tongued vision of a pretentiously undated metaphorical Next. Balked by some seemingly unaddressable refusal to do her homework in the ways the 21st century is actually being made storyable by writers who have gone to school, Atwood is of course not writing contemporary SF about the near future, which is one of the most difficult and learned creative enterprises—hard-to-master regions of the imagination—a writer can envisage, now that the human race has become isomorphous with the data that iterate the real; what Atwood is in fact writing is sci-fi about the near future as envisioned by Hollywood. Her sisters and brothers of the cloth are not Sterling or Stephenson but the beleaguered souls who novelize Star Trek or Star Wars in obedience to bibles that constrain them to a view of the world as deeply retro as the world we encounter in Oryx and Crake, as Christopher Walken's son encounters in Blast from the Past.

An open book that should be open and shut

But most of the examples of occluded grasp occur before page 216 (in all English-language editions). And even before we reach that page we begin to find out what we had already surmised—that something or someone is about to pull the plug on Homo sapiens. Crake matriculates into the Watson-Crick Institute, where he is given everything from lab space to whores, while the far less intelligent Snowman (whose real name is Jimmy) goes to the Martha Graham Academy in New York, which is limned in colours evocative of Thomas M. Disch's great On Wings of Song (1979). There are some genuinely good jokes, which Atwood clearly makes on those occasions when she is able to forget what she is refusing to admit. And there are the Crakers.

We had met them early on, but it is really only in retrospect that we—and, one suspects, Atwood—begin to find them of much interest. They turn out to be a gene-crafted race of post-humans that Crake has designed as inheritors of the earth. They are passive and peaceful; a Craker female will enter estrus only every 18 months or so, at which point a small Morris dance of males uplift their penises together in a kind of Mexican Wave and shepherd her into a handy alcove where, one at a time, they blamelessly couple; they are vegetarian; they do not have any use for words; they are smooth outside and smooth inside. Snowman acts as a kind of pro tem God/Moses/Messenger for them, and the novel closes at a moment of narrative suspension: for it is not at all clear to not over-bright Snowman that they will survive their inevitable encounters with other humans less tenderhearted than he is.

For Snowman is not the only survivor of Crake's double-pronged assault upon the world (I have not forgotten Oryx any more than Atwood seems to have for most of the book; she is a young whore from an unnamed Far Eastern country, rather like the protagonists of two or three of Geoff Ryman's better early novels about young girls growing up in utterly cruel worlds transformed by genetic engineering; she is Crake's special woman; she becomes Snowman's lover for a while; there is little more to say). Other humans have proved immune to the viral plague Crake has engineered and transmits worldwide (there is a presumed homage here to La Jetee, from which 12 Monkeys was made; or perhaps to James Tiptree Jr.'s "The Last Flight of Doctor Ain" from 1972). We meet these humans at the end of the tale. We do not really know what to make of them, and before we can hazard much of a guess, Atwood shuts her book on a slingshot.

So there have been moments of recovery. The devastated catastrophe-ridden world Crake wipes clear of humanity is pungently described. Snowman's solitary life in this new desert is sharply imagined. Oryx is clearly beautiful, and clearly beyond the understanding of anyone in the text; or of the text itself, which cannot allow too much reality into its cod-dystopian remit, into its sci-fi-in-bondage gaze upward from the deep past toward the aged props of yesterday. Like some fossil jewel, Oryx and Crake does shine moistly for an instant under the tap, when its author forgets herself, before it falls back into the sands of time, which cover it. When we shut the book, it is as though it had never been.


John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. His first novel for 25 years, Appleseed, was a New York Times Notable Book for 2002. He is the author of Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia and co-editor of both The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, all Hugo Award winners. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times. The Washington Post, Omni, F&SF and elsewhere. Much of this material has been collected in Strokes: Reviews and Essays 1966-1986, Look at the Evidence: Reviews and Essays, and the forthcoming Scores: Reviews 1993-2003, which will include the first 76 "Excessive Candour" columns and other pieces. Also forthcoming is An Historical Dictionary of Horror Literature.