WOLVOGS, PIGOONS AND CRAKERS - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 168

Borders and God appear several times in this chapter. The world imagined by
Atwood is 'global' in the sense that the environmental devastation unleashed upon
it is planetary, but there are borders and spaces in which the main human character,
who as a boy was called Jimmy but who in the environmentally desolate 'now' of
the novel calls himself 'Snowman', can hide. Indeed, the novel opens with
Snowman waking up in a tree, where he sleeps to protect himself against the
predatory wolvogs and pigoons. He looks out on
the eastern horizon [where] there's a greyish haze, lit now with a rosy, deadly
glow . . . The offshore towers stand out in dark silhouette against it, rising
improbably out of the pink and pale blue of the lagoon. The shrieks of birds
that nest out there and the distant ocean grinding against the ersatz reefs of
rusted car parts and jumbled rocks and assorted rubble sound almost like
holiday traffic.
(Atwood, 2004: 5)
Atwood conjures up a near-future world in which the natural and the unnatural—
rosy, deadly glows; ersatz reefs; shrieking birds—play worryingly and ambiguously
against each other. This account is, of course, only Snowman's interpretation, and
it brings the human perspective in this troubled environment forcefully into view.
'Out of habit', we are then told, he looks at his watch, which has a blank face that
prompts his thought: 'zero hour. It causes a jolt of terror to run through him, this
absence of official time. Nobody nowhere knows what time it is' (ibid.: 5). Nobody
nowhere because, as far as Snowman knows at the beginning of Oryx and Crake ,
he is the only living human, the last survivor before the onset of an entirely post-
human world. Soon after, scanning the horizon where 'the sea is hot metal, the sky
a bleached blue', he yells out 'Crake!', and when he receives no answer, adds, 'You
did this!' (ibid.: 15). Crake, we learn, had been Jimmy's childhood friend, Glenn,
who changed his name before setting out on a path to create an environmental
apocalypse that indicates his delusion of God-like powers. In the true sense, though,
Snowman is wrong, for though Crake certainly has been instrumental in wiping
out seemingly all-but-one human (this is precisely Crake's plan), he cannot be
blamed for the wolvogs and the pigoons and for much of the environmental
degradation. Indeed, Crake's actions might be treated as a radical and diabolically
successful response to the negative bodysplices and the destructively retooled world
they represent. He might be interpreted not as the greatest sociopath in human
history, but as the greatest eco-warrior in human history, who wants to bring that
history to a close in order to save the planet from humans. The fact that wolvogs
and pigoons continue to exist, however, threatens Crake's plan to repopulate the
Earth with his own bodysplices, the Crakers, effectively calling into question his
belief in his superhuman powers.
In order to make sense of what, even from these brief snippets, clearly is a
complex and playfully provocative novel, let alone to put Snowman, Crake and
the spliced creatures into context, we need to understand that there are two