Tag Archive: Margaret Atwood


ORYX AND CRAKE – PARADISE LOST

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January 30, 2014

ORYX & CRAKE by Margaret Atwood (Vintage Press, 2009)  –  MaddAddam Trilogy #1

The world of Oryx  &  Crake resembles a corrupted and desolate Garden of Eden.  There’s plenty of irony and black humour but ultimately this is a bleak dystopian vision of the near future.  Planet Earth is in a sorry state wherein “The whole world is now one vast controlled experiment”. 

Against a backdrop of thinly veiled class conflict between the privileged world of the ‘Compounds’  and  the dispossessed zones of the Pleeblands, we take no encouragement from re-engineered humans (Children Of Crake) who are little more than benign zombies.

Margaret Atwood throws in a plethora of apocalyptic elements, any one of which would be enough to strike the death knell for humanity.  Taken all together this looks like being the end of the world as we know it. Continue reading →

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STILL LIVES AND DINOSAURS

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May 2, 2012

LIFE BEFORE MAN by Margaret Atwood (First published 1980)

Margaret Atwood is an intelligent enough writer not to depend on contrived drama or sensationalised events, but with this novel she’s almost dispensed with a plot too. This wouldn’t necessarily be a drawback if any of the characters were likeable but I couldn’t warm to, or care about, any of them.

The story, if you could call it that, is told from three perspectives. The dated chapters alternate between the points of view of  an unhappily married couple Elizabeth and Nate and his recently acquired lover Lesje (pronounced Lashia).

Both women are paleontologists which, given the title, seems an obvious cue for rating the male of the species on a par with dinosaurs. The nearest we get to this accusation is near the end when, at the end of her tether, we are told of Lesje that “it’s long been her theoretical opinion that Man is a danger to the universe, a mischievous ape, spiteful, destructive, malevolent”.  Continue reading →

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HUNGER AND RAGE : WHAT MAKES A MURDERER?

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April 21, 2012

What are the motives for murder? Margaret Atwood offers some clues in her short fiction – Simple Murders. Brilliant writing , I think.

“It was because of the chocolate bars. It was because of the stars. It was because of a life behind bars. It was her hormones.  It was the radiation from the wires and phones. It was his mother saying , ‘You’ll never amount to a hill of beans’. It was because he was all-fired mean. It was the sleeping pills.It was the frills, on the blouse, under the jacket, over the breasts. It was the blood tests. It was the sigh, the cry, the hand on the thigh. It was the hunger, it was the rage, it was the spirit of the age”

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MARGARET ATWOOD – THE PERILS OF PERFECTION

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November 29, 2011

Margaret Atwood’s article ‘The Road To Ustopia’ published in The Guardian is an excellent piece explaining how she sees the differences between science fiction, speculative fiction and fantasy.

Plenty of insights into her writing which makes me want to read more of her work. She also has thesewise words to say about striving to improve the world we live in on planet Earth:

“Of course we should try to make things better, insofar as it lies within our power. But we should probably not try to make things perfect, especially not ourselves, for that path leads to mass graves”.

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