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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The novelist Margaret Atwood has wandered off from us before: once, in 1986, to the mid-twenty-first century, for a feminist dystopia, "The Handmaid's Tale,"in which women are enslaved according to their reproductive usefulness; another time, in 1996, to the nineteenth century, to make thrifty use of her graduate work at Radcliffe in the faux-Victorian novel "Alias Grace."These were forays and raids. In her chronicling of contemporary sexual manners and politics, Atwood has always been interested in pilfering popular forms--comic books, gothic tales, detective novels, science fiction--in order to make them do her more literary bidding. Her previous novel, "The Blind Assassin,"is the best example of the kind of narrative pastiche at which she excels.
In her towering and intrepid new novel, "Oryx and Crake"(Nan A. Talese/Doubleday; $26), Atwood, who is the daughter of a biologist, vividly imagines a late-twenty-first-century world ravaged by innovations in biological science. Like most literary imaginings of the future, her vision is mournful, bleak, and infernal, and is punctuated, in Atwood style, with the occasional macabre joke--perhaps not unlike Dante's own literary vision. Atwood's pilgrim in Hell is Snowman, who, following a genetically engineered viral cataclysm, is, as far as he knows, the only human being who has survived. Snowman (formerly Jimmy) has become arboreal, living in trees and in shelters of junk, roaming the beaches and picnic grounds of a former park--where fungi sprout from rotting picnic tables and barbecues are festooned with bindweed--scavenging for food. His only companions are a dozen or so humanoids, the Crakers--gentle, naked, beautiful creations of Jimmy's old, half-mad scientist friend Crake. Freed from their experimental lab, the Crakers also live near the beach....
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