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‘Oryx and Crake is Atwood at her best — dark, dry, scabrously witty, yet moving and studded with flashes of pure poetry. Her gloriously inventive brave new world is all the more chilling because of the mirror it holds up to our own. Citizens, be warned.’ Lisa Appignanesi, Independent — in full ‘The novel shifts back and forth and time between the present on the beach that Snowman shares with the "Crakers" and the recent past, the overture to doom. It's an effective way to create suspense, and each section is compelling in its own right. Atwood's own gift for language weaves pleasure through the novel. Skilfully she takes images we recognise (a pyre from the foot and mouth epidemic, say) and grafts them into a new context; she leaps ahead into a world that is in many ways more disturbing than that of The Handmaid's Tale because it is more recognisable. Recognisable too because of the voice — pathetic, familiar, damaged — of Snowman, the ordinary remnant of humanity. The balance between the mundane and the horrifying is elegantly held. When I first read Oryx and Crake there was no war in Iraq and there had been no outbreak of the Sars virus. By my second reading, both events eclipsed most everything else in the news. The world, of course, is always a dangerous and slippery place; though sometimes it feels unusually so; sometimes it causes us to ask, with an extra edge of anxiety, what does the future hold? Atwood's eerie vision of the not-so distant future once again provides a coherently imagined answer, one that is compelling and disquieting in equal measure.’ Erica Wagner, The Times
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