Atwood attributes her changing vision of the future to scientific advances. Everything that happens in “Oryx and Crake,” she says, is within the realm of possibility. She thus considers her latest novel “speculative”–that is, imaginable in this world–rather than science fiction. While writing “Oryx and Crake,” she compiled a box of newspaper clippings from which she drew inspiration. “[The book] contains nothing humans haven’t done, or aren’t think-ing about doing,” she told a spellbound audience in May at Hay-on-Wye, the site of Britain’s best-known literary festival. In “Oryx and Crake,” the terrifying beasts of Atwood’s dark imagination take the form of pigs growing five or six kidneys to be harvested for human transplants, and chickens producing 12 drumsticks each.
Atwood’s unusual upbringing may help explain her provocative point of view. Born in November 1939, she has had her work shaped by her experience of war as well as her unorthodox childhood. Each spring she set off with her parents and older brother to live for several months at the forest-insect research station that her father ran in northern Quebec. She was home-schooled, and her early lessons in wilderness survival are echoed in “Oryx and Crake”: the narrator, Jimmy, struggles against a lawless, ecologically devastated world. She also draws upon the experience in her 1989 novel “Cat’s Eye,” in which a lonely little girl named Elaine–who retreats with her family into the woods each spring–is isolated from her friends and vulnerable to their cruelties. Indeed, one of Atwood’s favorite themes is the power childhood experience wields over adult lives. “[Children’s] emotions are very intense because you don’t think you have any other choices,” she says over tea at London’s Groucho Club. “You think that whatever’s happening to you is meant to happen. And therefore it’s all fraught with a kind of significance.”
Her lifelong obsession with war has also left traces throughout her novels. (She is so preoccupied with the subject that she recently spent a holiday exploring World War II battlefields in Europe.) In “The Robber Bride,” Tony, a female war historian, analyzes relationships in militaristic terms and re-enacts historical battles with colored spices representing armies on a sand table. Atwood derived the model for the religious-fundamentalist society in “The Handmaid’s Tale” from a 1978 trip she, her husband and their toddler daughter took to Central Asia. They visited Afghanistan and Iran to see the scene of one of the most horrific retreats in history, when British troops descending a precipitous road from Kabul to Jalalabad in 1842 were massacred by Afghan forces. In “Oryx and Crake,” Jimmy leads–with more success–an experimental race of genetically modified humans on a similarly tense, perilous journey through a grim wasteland of disease and starvation.
Though she insists that she’s not seeking to change society or politics, Atwood’s wide-ranging knowledge of history and science gives her plots depth and a broader relevance. “I think simply by describing facets of reality as they are, you give people a choice. Books are just doors,” she says. In “Oryx and Crake,” Atwood reveals a world in which rich people–like Jimmy–live in gated villages run by biotech companies and are supplied with child porn and prostitutes from the impoverished, violent communities outside. Among the compelling advantages of genetic modification she offers: humans bred without aggression or violent sexual urges.
Atwood likens the process of writing to a shaman’s “dangerous” journey. “[His] soul leaves [his] body, goes to another place and there he does a negotiation or fights a battle, and he brings back something that will be of use to the living.” Why is it dangerous? She nervously scans the comfortable bar of the Groucho Club, a popular hangout for writers, actors and journalists. “Some people never come back,” she says finally. “Need we talk about Sylvia Plath?” Made of sterner stuff, Atwood returns victorious from her latest vision of a brutal, dehumanized future, brimming with vivid characters and unsettling prophecies.
