Oryx and Crake
by Margaret Atwood
Read by Alex Jennings (6 hours, Bloomsbury, £16.99)
With embryo cloning and the pursuit of physical perfection, Margaret Atwood's futuristic dystopia is unnervingly close to our present day. Beginning with Jimmy after the apocalypse, the story unfolds in flashbacks. Jimmy's adolescent friend was the super-bright Crake, who was to make it big in one of the all-powerful biotech corporations.
As elite workers for these monster corporations, their parents lived in a compound protected from the Pleeblands, where the rebellious masses lived in turmoil, racked by disease. Jimmy and Crake ate biotech food, such as chicken from brainless birds engineered to grow multiple breasts, and surfed the net for violence and porn.
After graduation, Crake started his Paradice Project, an embryo-alteration programme designed to create perfect human beings. His prototypes, the 'children of Crake', live in a bubble dome. The apocalypse is caused by an uncontrollable virus which scythes through the elite population, and Jimmy is left to starve in a desolate wasteland, the last human being, surrounded by Crake's wandering automata.
The bite of this powerful moral fable is sharpened through listening rather than reading. Apart from Jimmy, on the page the characters tend to remain a mix of detailed, clever ideas, but hearing their spoken voices makes them into more credible and sinister beings. The reading also elicits our sympathy for Jimmy. As we identify with him, we experience his horror at the ruin of what we feel is our world.
