muninnhuginn | The Salon on Atwood

Well, she's winning on the classification war: there's no mention of anything but speculative fiction in the review of Oryx and Crake in The Salon. It's nice and brief--the coverage has been growing into some kind of Atforest. It's also superficial, but maybe that reflects the book. The reviewer categorises it amongst the "middling Atwood novels". And at least we get to find out who Oryx is: that's been puzzling us for a while. The "cascade of Atwoodian jokes and riffs on the preoccupations of late capitalism" are hardly new, just variations on themes of evocatively named excessively violent computer games and appalling brands of fake food. Will the reference to Kwicktime Osama not date the book terribly, and terribly rapidly at that?

What really puzzles us is the notion that 'the world it [Oryx and Crake] postulates is so much more plausible than that of "The Handmaid's Tale"'. Admittedly it's a while since we read the latter so we're working from memory plus the R4 abridgement, but, from a global perspective anyway, it's never rung more true.

Not a great review, and, assuming it repeated all the best jokes, not an incentive to buy the book.