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04/20/2005: "Reading Right Now: Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood"

I am simultaneously intimidated by and jealous of the brilliance of Margaret Atwood’s writing.

But I read somewhere that writers should feed themselves with good books. So maybe I read Atwood partly because I enjoy it and partly because I hope her talent will rub off on me somehow.

Atwood’s prose always feels like poetry to me. And I love how the world of Oryx and Crake reveals itself slowly like a beautiful woman shedding veil after veil. It doesn’t feel tedious; I don’t feel impatient. Instead it’s sensuous somehow, a leisurely getting-to-know-you. It reminds me of that scene in “The Scarlet Pimpernel” where Percy tells his newfound love, “you must tell me all about yourself, but slowly, ever so slowly, so that it will take a very, very long time.”

I also like how the main character in the book is Snowman, not Oryx, not Crake. (Or at least not yet and/or not in my view.) Maybe it’s like Othello where the main character isn’t so much the title character as it is a “secondary” character (Iago) or perhaps Iago’s obsession with Othello. Maybe Oryx and Crate isn’t about Oryx and Crate so much as it is about Snowman and his obsession with Oryx and Crate, his ideas about them, his feelings about them, his stories about them.

Maybe that’s why I like Snowman - he’s a word person surrounded by numbers people. He makes up stories. He spins creation myths for his supper. I especially like that the Children of Crake ate up all the words before the Children of Oryx (the animals) were born.