Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

On my kick for reading dystopian novels, I came across Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. I've read Atwood's novels before, well, just one, The Handmaid's Tale. I enjoyed that book very much (rated it 9/10 back in January 2009). I'm not sure if this happens to anyone else, but after reading a good book by a particular author, I find that the author's other books can't compare to the first one I read.

But not with Margaret Atwood. Oryx and Crake is deep, sinister, framed within a rather normal hedonistic society. But isn't that true of our current society? It focuses on Jimmy/Snowman, the seemingly last normal man on Earth. In the "present," he lives in a tree and some strange "perfected" people live nearby, asking him questions, wanting stories, providing one fish per week as ordered by Crake. These people are always naked, eat only plants, have green eyes, and do not understand much about the world. And so the story of Jimmy, Crake, and Oryx unfolds through a series of flashback chapters that slowly reveal how things came to be in the present. I can't say much else, because the key ingredient of this book is the slow reveal and what is revealed is well...awesome.

Atwood apparently did quite a bit of research when writing this book and it shows. There's a bit of science in the novel, but it's nothing a common reader cannot grasp. It's a beautifully written book all the way until the end. Apparently, 6 years after writing Oryx and Crake, Atwood released a sequel: The Year of the Flood. After finishing Oryx and Crake, I'm bleeding to read the next installation.

Oryx and Crake gets a 10/10. It's just that good!