Snowman, once known as Jimmy, sleeps in a tree with a dirty bed sheet and laments the loss of his beautiful and beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake. Seemingly the only survivor in a stark and terrifying post-apocolyptic landscape, the narrative follows Snowman as he lives in the present and remember the past. In the midst of his struggle for survival, with only the Crakers for company, Snowman is faced with the taxing questions of whether he should have seen it coming and whether there was anything he could have done.
Margaret Atwood does it again (wait, have a written yet about The Handmaid’s Tale or The Blind Assassin?). Her post-apocalyptic world is stark and inventive, forcing the reader to ask some heavy questions about ethics and science and the what makes us truly human. Short-listed for the Man Booker in 2003, it is a bleak and twisted love story and a clever and chilling prophetic narrative about the not-so-sci-fi problems that face our real world modern society. A decipherable plot is unclear for most of the novel, which is instead driven by the reader’s curiosity to discover the cause of the collapse of society as well as the current situation of the protagonist, Snowman.
While it’s not my favourite Atwood, it is though-provoking, challenging and a good read.
