Oryx and Crake

The paperback version has a crap cover. Out of keeping with the actual story. [%sig%]

If you're still interested in batting those ideas around Andrew, I've mailed you my immediate thoughts.

I must say I was disappointed by O&C, only in the sense that it was built up to be something that it really failed to deliver. The ideas eschewed are fantastic but the distopic world it describes is almost too abstract for us to associate with. The descriptions of the pre-collapse world before are vague, almost as ethereal as the post-collapse world. If you are inclined to disagree with anything to do with GM, O&C is a good timber to have in your yard, but ultimately it's a parade of Atwood narrative and descriptive skills rather than any persuasive political or social argument.

I found it very disappointing, but I was interested in why I found it disappointing. A bit like Vanilla Sky - it didn't work, but in its failings it was still more interesting than a lot of stuff that aims very low and succeeds. My main interest was in why Atwood wrote the female character in such a flat and almost artificial way, and whether there was a subtext there that Oryx was actually not a person at all, but a Crake creation.

I've been reading Blind Assassin lately, my first attempt at anything by Attwood. Contrary to my expectations, I'm liking it very much. I had feared it would be one of these tediously slow 'domestic romances' in which nothing happens. Nope. Much better than that.

Just finished "Oryx And Crake" - yes it's good but not, to my mind, wonderfully good. The characters are weak - Crake simply becomes yet another evil scientist and Oryx hardly exists, it's as though she were put in to beef up the sex angle but otherwise of little interest, an extraordinary step for a female writer. But the inventiveness and strength of narrative kept me going, a lesser writer I would have given up on.

Snowman- means cocaine user- isolated hearing voices etc.

I think Oryx was supposed to be flat. Atwood is always interested in what we expect from a female character and what comes of that....

Agree to an extent, Fergal (or should I say Hayley?) - Atwood is far too skilled with characterisation to write a dull and lifeless character by accident. It is assessing the purpose that intrigues me - she is so passive, almost like the early artificial intelligence computer programmes that just spit out canned responses... I much preferred the Blind Assassin, and don't think you can really top Cat's Eye as a work of fiction.

Yeah it's Hayley. I let that particular cat out of the bag. Pseudonyms never last long for me... I agree actually. I think she took it too far. I did enjoy it, but quite frankly Cat's Eye is ultimately fabulous in all ways. I happen to think Atwood is very funny in a very dry, aloof way, and this is very true in Cat's Eye. It's good because it's dark and dry and funny. Hard to top that once you've written it, huh?

There are so many bits I love in Cat's Eye - the mundane banality of casual minor evil, the pointlessness of cutting pictures out of catalogues, the way that the whole relationship with her brother seems charged and doomed with sadness (a sadness that in fiction, I've only seen matched by Yossarian's feelings about Snowden in Catch 22), the sharpness of friends. The wonderful moment where her father explains that because we are treating diabetics, this will inexorably end the human race as we drown in animal dung... Odd because, to touch on the conversation we are having in another thread, this is a book where nothing huge happens to anyone but we are made aware of how a person can carry small hurtful things around with them forever. We never get the resolution we and the narrator are hoping for - there is no moment of revenge, or redemption for Cordelia, no forgiveness only regret. And yet I still love it. Have you read The Final Confession of Mabel Stark, Hayley? It is a very Atwood-esque fictionalised account of a genuine woman who trained tigers; it has the same feel for small detail and the same playfulness with time. There's a lovely line in it that memory is like a big bag of coloured gobstoppers and the colours from one memory rub off onto others, so you don't always deal with memory in isolation, but how it makes you feel now and also how it felt at other moments in your life that are distant from the memory itself. It is also just generally breathtaking - the power of the tigers really comes through, you feel the weight of the paws and the sweet meaty breath.

Mornin Andrew. I agree with all those things you said about Cat's Eye. The casual cruelty was really striking, as was the pointless games the girls play. I loved Elaine's family; the way Elaine describes them in flashes of description or through dialogue or through her own embarassment. The gorgeousness (even in Cordelia's eyes) or Elaine's brother, yet the obvious disconnection he has with human existence. I also liked all the description of art, the made up retrospective. Sometimes I think I've seen a painting or maybe that installation she does with her feminist friends, and then I realise that I actually only read it and Atwood made them exist in my head. Clever. And one of the best things about reading in general. (I happen to think that's why books like the Lord of the Rings, or his Dark Materials or even Harry Potter do so well, because people like having visuals implanted into their heads with words.... entire landscapes and peoples and colours swathed across their brain and different to everyone elses. Or maybe I'm being daft!) That line about treating diabetics was fabulous. Made me jolt in my chair (in a good way, obviously). Have never read The Final Confession of Mabel Stark but am in the library now so after being on here I shall get myself up to the fiction section to take it out. I needed a new book too because I just finished The Edible Woman to see how me at 27 compared with Atwood at 25. Was a good book, but no way near in the league of her later ones. Was interesting to see which themes have always interested her (the passive female, the many roled female, food as control, public/private self, that kind of thing). I defy anybody to read your descrtipton of The Final Confesson of Mabel Stark and not want to read it straight away.

This is a nice link about the book, which Kate Winslet is going to make into a filum. I read two books last year that I would consider to be extraordinary, as opposed to just very good. This one, and Jonathan Safran Foer's "Everything is Illuminated" - both made me cry and grin and jealous as all hell. And I'm a big Steinbeck fan too Hayley, so I ought to read some of your fiction. Any tips as to where I should start? A URL would be nice too, as I am inherently lazy...

Here are links to the stuff I've put on here. Don't know what I think about it yet as I've only been on here a week or two and all of these were written during that time... and just to prove why I write fiction and am not a poet. These are various experments. I don't always write stuff like this, but am trying things out. Now I need some links to yours, if you'd be so kind.

Okay, I put the links in wrong. Here goe's again and just to prove why I write fiction and am not a poet by any stretch of the (over emotive and adjectivey) imagination

Geez.

oh and everything is illuminated is brilliant!! Have you read Jeffrey Eugedines' Middlesex? That's a book I read this last year that I thought was brilliant and made me jealous. Some people are snobby about it, but I like what I like whether it's 'high lit' or whatever. It's written in a very approachable way which many reviewers mistake for lack of skill. Silly reviewers.

Hayley - drop me an email with one of your stories - the site is giving me bad gateway at the moment, v frustrating...

Yeah, I'm having the gateway thing too. Have just sent an email, though from a MAC so lord knows if you'll be able to read it...

Liked this

I just finished this book a few weeks ago. I really enjoyed it. If you still want to discuss this off the forum, feel free to email me directly. [%sig%]

Margaret Atwood, is she the one who wrote the "Handmaiden's Tale?" Isn't she Canadian? In New Hampshire, we consider Canada as a really big, even humungous backyard.