CONNECTICUT LIBRARIES
October 2003, Vol. 45, No. 9
What happens when you separate the "number-people" from the "word-people?" Margaret Atwood suggests, in her latest novel, that the number-people rule and the word-people shill for the number-people. While Atwood's tale may be grim, she tells it with style and humor.Atwood takes us to two worlds of the future through the eyes of Snowman, a shaman-like character who was once a word-person known as Jimmy. Snowman has taken responsibility for guiding and educating the godly-appearing, but utterly naïve people of Crake. He liberally spices his vital lessons with pure nonsense. The "Crakes" accept the pronouncements of Snowman as the words of a prophet, the prophet of Crake, their creator. Snowman also teaches the Crakes about Oryx, the motherly figure who helped bring the Crakes to their new world. Snowman knows himself to be only a man, but the man who accepted Crake's order to take responsibility for his perfect creations.
Jimmy lived in a high-tech world where gene manipulation extended the lives of individuals, at least those who could afford the cost of scientific advancement. The people of that world existed in a neo-caste system. At the top stood the scientists and engineers of the large corporations. These number-people manipulated the tiny stuff of life to create products for the masses, for these men of science were also watchers of "bottom-line" numbers. They developed the "pigoon," an oversized hog, to harvest as many human replacement organs as possible from a single host. The number-people also played, creating the "rakunk," an appealing, odorless mixture of raccoon and skunk. Sometimes their playfulness reflected haughtiness, rather than humanity. The "snat," for example, was never a product engineered to serve mankind. It is a scaly, fanged snake/rat combo.
Living in the luxurious compounds of the corporations for which they worked, the number-people feared neither snat, nor much else. Disease, war, overpopulation, and disaster appeared to stop at their gate. These compound-dwellers lived in a space as secure from infection as the living cells they developed. Society must, after all, protect the inventors of the talking toaster, shoes that change color to match your clothing, the shirt that displays your email, and the gym outfit that cleans itself using sweat-eating bacteria.
Below the number-people in the social system, sat the word-people, people like Jimmy. His family worked for a corporation and he lived in a compound that provided him with home, exotic entertainment, education, places to shop, and security escorts when he chose to visit the "pleeblands." Unlike best friend Crake, a stellar number-person, Jimmy had little talent in math and science. Instead of the best schools, he attended an arts school of such inferior status that its library still held hardcopy resources within its walls. He worked there briefly, separating books whose contents would be destroyed from those marked for electronic survival. At Martha Graham Academy, he learned to package and sell, in ways as cynical as they were creative, the latest innovations of the number-people. When he found full-time employment, it was as a "wordserf" with one of the smaller companies, in a lesser compound.
The rest of humanity inhabited the "pleeblands." Money and influence mattered in those dangerous places whose inferior denizens served as market for the products of the corporate compounds. Even the pleeblands' most well off inhabitants were have-nots compared to the corporate haves. However, conscience survived in the pleeblands. Occasionally, a privileged compound-dweller fled to the pleeblands to defy the corporations, decry their monstrosities, and protest the devastation of the environment.
Jimmy survives a global designer plague to find the compounds deserted, pigoons transformed into wily carnivores, and vicious packs of "wolvogs" stalking the nights. In his Snowman identity in this new world, the second future described to us by Atwood, Jimmy reflects on the deterioration of his parents' marriage, on his mother's abandonment of compound and family, and on his relationships with Crake, his benefactor, and Oryx, his lost love. He remembers how his boyhood friend, a peerless success at RejoovenEssence, the largest of corporate compounds, rescued him from obscurity to assist him with two of his most ambitious of projects: BlyssPlus and the Paradice Method. The former was Crake's miracle pill designed to protect humans from all sexually transmitted diseases, provide unlimited libido, prolong youth, and solve the population problem by secretly sterilizing everyone who swallowed it. The Paradice Method promised customers that RejoovenEssence would be able to manufacture the "totally chosen baby," a child that would incorporate any physical, mental, or spiritual characteristic that the consumer might desire.
Jimmy ponders how BlyssPlus, the Paradice Method, and the worldwide plague are related, and whether or not the perfectly designed children of Crake can thrive in the world outside their compound. Jimmy and Atwood leave us wondering if, possibly, Crake might have been a closet word-person.
Editor's note: For a non-fiction treatment of similar themes, see September's column on Enough, by Bill McKibben
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