Oryx and Crake
by Margaret Atwood
384pp, Bloomsbury, £16.99
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 humanoid 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).