'Oryx and Crake' -- Atwood at her peak

Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood. Doubleday. 376 pages. $26.

Margaret Atwood writes, "Every novel begins with a what if, and then sets forth its axioms. The what if of Oryx and Crake is simply, "What if we continue down the road we're already on?"

The answer provided by Atwood's startling novel comes inexorably: Nothing good, nothing good at all.

Set in the very near future on a post-apocalyptic Earth onto which an unrelenting sun beats and which is overrun with predatory lab animals, the book details the life and ruminations of Jimmy, aka Snowman (as in Abominable, a rarely seen and possibly mythic creature), the last surviving human on the planet. Atwood's narrative shifts between Jimmy's present and the pre-apocalyptic past.

Jimmy grew up in an early 21st-century world in which gated city-states run by corporate biotech firms form an elite enclave for the smart, affluent and disease-free, while the Pleeblands hold the rough urban centers where crime, drugs and terrorism abound. Jimmy's parents are scientists, but his mother abandons her calling early, concerned over the ethics and morality of high-tech bio-engineering, finally fleeing the community she views as a prison rather than a safety zone.

Just before his mother's escape into the world of guerrilla environmentalism, the adolescent Jimmy meets Crake, an emotionally distant genius who becomes his best friend. The two spend hours playing computer games: Extinctathon, Kwiktime Osama, and Blood and Roses, or searching for porn sites, like HottTotts kiddie porn, where they first see Oryx, a young Southeast Asian girl sold into sex-slavery by her parents, who later becomes Crake's assistant and Jimmy's much-loved paramour.

The dynamic among the three combines with Crake's soulless brilliance: He's designed a new race of human beings, the Crakers -- passive, pretty and vapid -- for a biotech corporation, and Oryx, survivor of the basest aspects of human existence, programs them to cope with the world while Jimmy designs other aspects of their lives.

The trajectory of events that ensues is as unstoppable as it is deadly. What transpired to cause the destruction of the human race? What became of Oryx and Crake? Why is Jimmy the sole survivor and what will become of the pseudo-human Crakers, who have no concept of language, books or knowledge? Those tantalizing questions will have readers turning the pages of this extraordinary book as fast as (humanly) possible.

Oryx and Crake isn't sci-fi: Atwood uses science, politics and economic disparities already in play -- gene-splicing, hybridization, cloning, bio-terrorism, global warming, over-urbanization, extinction -- and poses that scary "what if." Like Orwell and Huxley before her, Atwood takes the world as we know it and suggests scenarios both frightening and all-too-probable. (For all the talk of worldwide terrorism, how likely did 9 / 11 seem the day before the planes bisected the World Trade Center?)

With a panoply of stellar books (novels, poetry, essays) in her repertoire, and having won the coveted Booker Prize for her most recent novel, The Blind Assassin, Atwood has long since established herself as one of the best writers in English today, but Oryx and Crake may very well be her best work yet.

Brilliant, provocative, sumptuous and downright terrifying, Oryx and Crake is a sharp-edged down-and-dirty page-turner with a deftly wrought message in Atwood's smart, electric language about where we humans could end up if we continue to allow greed and myopia to outstrip ethics and morality. Atwood uses those rare birds, oryx and crake, like canaries in the mines, to invoke a metaphor -- and warning -- for our times, and does it superbly.

Victoria A. Brownworth writes for many national publications and is the author of numerous books. She teaches writing and film at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She is currently at work on a book on faith healing.