The Age of Spoil

I just finished this book called "Oryx and Crake," by Margaret Atwood. It's sort of a post-apocalyptic/utopian novel. It opens on the only speaker, a man who calls himself Snowman, and his interaction with these Child-People he calls Crakers, named so after their apparent creator; whom, as we find out later, was a friend of Snowman's. Snowman lives in a tree and is always seemingly worried for his survival-- from the elements, wild animals, and starvation. As the book progresses, the current timeline is interspersed with visions from Snowman's past life, before he called himself Snowman. Before he was the only person left. Snowman gets hungry, gets drunk, fights off odd animal/animal mixes (pigoons, rakunks, that sort of thing), and interacts briefly with the Crakers as some sort of priest/diety mix. As he continues in his daily, survival-based existence, he recounts memories of Jimmy's life. His prior self, the pre-apocalypse person. So that's how that goes.

Anyhow, we learn that Crake was a childhood friend, his only real friend throughout his whole life. Even as a child, Crake was a hyper-intelligent, un-emotional being. Interested in mankind mostly as a study, and obsessed with idealism. He has no interest in sex, or jokes. He isn't cynical, it's just his way. He has interest only in thinking. He wants to fix the world, but not to save it. He wants to fix it, scientifically. Even in his own world, the world of Crake and Jimmy as teens, all diseases have been cured. The breakouts, Crake learns, are secret strains of disease contained within random samples of pills people pop to prolong life, or maybe just the illusion of youth. Skin supplements, and the like. Or sexual-ability enhancements. They exist so that the drug companies can continue to make profits, and the few people who discover this surreptitiously disappear.

As the lives of these two boys become the lives of men, they fall apart. Jimmy is a 'words person,' not a 'numbers person,' and Crake gets a job for one of the drug companies, researching, while Jimmy is stuck in a job copy-writing another company's advertisements. When they hook back up again, Crake is the biggest fish in the biggest pond, working on a project so secret that even his investors don't hold any information on it. He wants Jimmy to write the advertisements. His project is the Crakers, though he doesn't call them that himself. He has developed a new pill, BlyssPluss, which protects against all sexually-transmitted diseases, makes people super fucking horny, prolongs youth, and has one unadvertised function: instant sterility. The Crakers are the new children. After the entire world is sterile, they will buy these new children. The new people, humanity successfully erased from their neurons. Crake says he is studying immortality.

"...there were two major initiatives going forward. The first-- the BlyssPluss Pill-- was prophylactic in nature, and the logic behind it was simple: eliminate the external causes of death and you were halfway there.

"External causes?" said Jimmy.

"War, which is to say misplaced sexual energy, which we consider to be a larger factor than the economic, racial, and religious causes often cited. Contagious diseases, especially sexually transmitted ones. Overpopulation, leading-- as we've seen in spades-- to environmental degradation and poor nutrition." [Crake speaking]

Jimmy said it sounded like a tall order: so much had been tried in those areas, so much had failed. Crake smiled. "If at first you don't succeed, read the instructions," he said.

"Meaning?"

"The proper study of Mankind is Man."

"Meaning?"

"You've got to work with what's on the table." " p.345

Anyhow, that is his project, as Jimmy understands it. Sterilization, followed by eventual replacement of the original human species with Crakers. Crakers, we learn, have no sex drive. They mate as they go in heat, which happens every several years, at a rate which Crake determined necessary for proper species re-creation. They eat only vegetation, grazing, in fact, like animals, and their excrement is properly, and naturally recycled-- they eat it. It's gross. The piss of the men serves to ward off wild animals, and the pee in a circle surrounding their camp every morning. Crake thought they would need some special job since the women have child-bearing down pat. They are perfectly harmonized with their environment, and therefore will never build shelters. With nothing to pass down, there will be no heredity disputes, or fights over materials. They lack imagination, and jokes. The language centers in their brains are suited only for direct communication. They are the perfect animal. An interesting, yet useless, fact is that they still dream. Apparently Crake was unable to ever erase dreams, though he hated them. He said every subject went insane. They are incapable of conceiving of a god, though they are also designed not to care about things like that. They accept everything Snowman tells them about Crake, because apparently they do require some vague notion of their existence. Lastly, they keel over at 30. Just drop dead. They don't ever ask questions about death. But it happens naturally and automatically at that particular birthday, before old age comes to plague them.

""At first," said Crake, "we had to alter ordinary human embryos, which we got from-- never mind where we got them from. But these people are sui generis. They're reproducing themselves, now."

"They look more than seven years old," said Jimmy.

Crake explained about the rapid-growth factors he'd incorporated. "Also," he said, "they're programmed to drop dead at age thirty-- suddenly, without getting sick. No old age, none of those anxieties. They'll just keel over. Not that they know it; none of them has died yet."

"I thought you were working on immortality."

"Immortality," said Crake, "is a concept. If you take 'mortality' as being, not death, but the foreknowledge of it and the fear of it, then 'immortality' is the absence of such fear. Babies are immortal. Edit out the fear, and you'll be..."

"Sounds like Applied Rhetoric 101," said Jimmy.

"What?"

"Never mind. Martha Graham stuff."

"Oh. Right."

Anyhow, as the book culminates, we learn that Crake's plan wasn't sterilization after all. Jimmy advertises for them for an unspecifed period of time-- perhaps a few months, maybe a couple years, and then all of a sudden, a plague breaks out all over the world simultaneously. It erupts from the people everywhere who had been popping Crake's pills, but from there it spreads throughout everyone, transmitted in the air as well as the water. Jimmy is the only one sealed in with the Crakens, Crake had charged him earlier to take care of them if he is gone. Crake makes it back to the compound, but Jimmy shoots him. The three of them, Crake, Jimmy, and Oryx (though she is not relevant to this discussion), are the only humans who are immune to this disease that wipes out all mankind, though Crake slits Oryx's throat just before Jimmy shoots him. I have now officially ruined all of the surprises of the book, but the more exciting part, to me anyways, is always the writing and the details, so I hope you won't mind.

But, like I said, it intrigues me. Not merely the utopian concepts of the book. Not just questioning Crake's theories, though that is also somewhat interesting. What got to me, cuz I just finished this book, was that second quote I wrote in up there. The thing Crake says about immortality being the absence of the fear of death. That concept isn't all that hard, but it made me think.

Prior to reading that, I had sort of a theory of the ending of childhood. That one ceases to be a mere infant and becomes a human being, kinda leaving the age of innocence at the moment they realize that their parents are falliable. I read something somewhere once to that effect, one of the characters asks another whether they can remember that moment, and it stuck with me because I can. It was when I was 4, and I remember it clearly. But the above quote changed that. What if the end of innocence is, in fact, the moment one fears death? Both theories coincide with a sort of Blake-ian idea of innocence. Of his books of poetry, The Age of Innocence, and The Age of Experience, the innocent one is the more violent. On the surface there are saccharine pictures of lambs and flowers, but the chimney sweep poem is tragic, they all are. And anyone who has been around children knows that they aren't saccharine. Without fear of death, they have no fear of gore. They're bloodthirsty little fuckers. I think fairytales pretty effectively prove that. The original fairytales, not the "child-proof" versions we have today. The Brothers Grimm sort of shit.

What do you think? I can recall fearing death, as well, when I was about 5, and though I do have a very clear memory of the first moment I was scared shitless of it, I don't specifically recall the seeds being planted. I do know, however, that they were planted in sunday school. I think religious kids fear death earlier. At my church, at least, they put the fear of hell into us in order to scare us into "accepting Jesus into our hearts."

That's my question. Whether this interests you enough to respond is up to you. I know all the explanation of the book was unnecessary to the actual question, but I like to explain where my ideas pop up from. I like to put them into context.