Oryx and Crake

The man calls himself Snowman. He sits on a beach, watching the sea, and feels something close to panic when he glances at his watch. The watch still works, but time itself no longer means anything. He is gaunt, covered in scabs, slowly starving. Nearby, children frolic in the water without a care in the world. They have green eyes and perfect skin. They are beautiful, innocent, and utterly alien to him.

Snowman never enters the sea. He is too cautious of what might lurk beneath the surface. But the children have no such fears. They splash and play, and Snowman envies them. He envies their innocence, their lack of memory, their freedom from the weight of everything that came before.

Soon enough, they come to him. They always do. They are curious about this strange, ragged figure who lives apart from them. They bring him objects they have found: a computer mouse, a plastic container. They hold these things up and ask what they are. Snowman gives them the same answer every time: "These are things from before."

The children accept this. They have built their own understanding of Snowman. They believe he is a bird who has forgotten how to fly, whose feathers have fallen out. They ask why his skin hangs loose, why hair grows on his face. He tells them these are feathers. They want feathers too, but that will not happen. Crake decreed that there would be no beards on the Children of Crake.

Snowman tells them to go away. They obey, but they will return. They always return, with more questions about a world they cannot comprehend. A world of toast and television, of cars and cities, of war and love and art and everything that made humans human. A world that no longer exists.

He sits alone and wishes he could hear "a fully human voice, like his own." Sometimes he makes animal noises or yells expletives while running along the beach. It helps, briefly. He imagines hearing a woman's voice, though not the voice of Oryx. Oryx, he thinks, "is no longer very talkative."

He thinks about women, about companionship. The thoughts are painful. He becomes angry and curses Crake, before wiping the tears from his eyes and telling himself, "Get a life."

The irony is not lost on him. He has no life. He is the last of his kind, a relic of a species that destroyed itself. And the man responsible for that destruction—Crake—was once his closest friend.

This is the world of Margaret Atwood's *Oryx and Crake*. The novel opens in a bleak present, with Snowman as the sole surviving human, surrounded by the genetically engineered beings known as the Children of Crake. They are Crake's creation, designed to replace humanity. They are peaceful, cooperative, and incapable of the destructive impulses that doomed their predecessors. They have no hierarchy, no jealousy, no racism. Their reproductive system is efficient and controlled. They die painlessly at thirty, without ever getting sick.

To Snowman, they are both a comfort and a torment. He feels protective of them, responsible for them. Crake chose him for this role, recognizing something in Jimmy that Crake himself lacked: empathy. But Snowman cannot truly connect with the Crakers. They are too perfect, too innocent. They have no understanding of the world that was lost—the world of art and poetry, of cruelty and kindness, of love and betrayal.

As he sits on the beach, the questions pile up. How did the world end? Who was Crake? What was his plan? And why was Snowman—then known as Jimmy—left behind to witness the extinction of his own species?

The novel does not answer these questions immediately. Instead, it moves back and forth in time, slowly revealing the story of how a brilliant, coldly logical boy named Glenn became the monstrous figure known as Crake. How a girl sold from her village became the enigmatic Oryx. How the friendship between Jimmy and Crake set in motion events that would reshape the planet.

But for now, there is only Snowman on the beach, watching the Crakers play, feeling the sun on his scabbed skin, wondering if he will survive another day. He has no answers, only memories. And the memories are unbearable.

How did a friendship between two boys—one artistic and emotional, the other scientific and detached—lead to the end of everything? And what does it say about humanity that its replacement was designed by a man who believed that love was "a hormonally induced delusional state"?