Must read|Atwoods's Oryx and Crake

The 2003 Booker shortlist, described by the prize panel?s chairman as a ?giant-killers? list?, was not able to dispense with one giant. Margaret Atwood?s Oryx and Crake.

Oryx and Crake
Margaret Atwood
• Price — £6.99
• Publication — Penguin

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The 2003 Booker shortlist, described by the prize panel’s chairman as a “giant-killers’ list”, was not able to dispense with one giant. Even as names like Martin Amis, JM Coetzee and Peter Carey fell by the wayside, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake sat firm on the shortlist.

And so it deserved to. If you have a vision of a fuddy-duddy woman past her prime, lacking colour in life or prose, perish the thought. Atwood wraps matters of profundity in a glittering film of humour, the teeming philosophical questions carried effortlessly along in a plot that matches pace with the best thrillers.

Oryx and Crake skips several decades, maybe a whole century, to plonk the reader down in a world that has already seen the ultimate consequence of the biotech boom — the near total destruction of mankind. The story swings between the present and the past, both seen through the eyes of Snowman, once known as Jimmy.

Jimmy, a wordsmith, something of a misfit in a society where cutting-edge science is the only thing that counts, makes friends at school with Crake, once known as Glenn, an impossibly brilliant youth.

What makes Oryx and Crake so distinct from the usual sci-fi/fantasy novel and so chilling is that this story may one day become true. The huge leaps in biotechnology bring with them ethical problems, and Atwood includes these in her story, but never in a preachy manner, never at the expense of the plot. She stands back, just a little, and watches as the new age crumbles under the weight of its own achievements.