FICTION: The past may well be a different country, but the future is often a familiar landscape with a few minor alterations. In literature, anyway. That's where Margaret Atwood finds herself in her latest novel. The time - unspecified late 21st century.
The place? Planet earth after a deadly plague has been unleashed.
It shouldn't come as any surprise to Atwood fans that she has stepped boldly etc, into futuristic fiction. She has been here before, after all. The Handmaid's Tale was a moral fable set in a similarly apocalyptic future where feminism and biological determinism meet head on. And her 2001 Booker-winning novel, The Blind Assassin, sheltered another novel within its folds - a science fiction fantasy of uncertain authorship, which was threaded through the main narrative.
Oryx and Crake is "Future Unadulterated", though. The epigraph alone should alert the reader - Jonathan Swift's health warning on Gulliver's Travels - "my principal design was to inform you, and not to amuse you". Oryx and Crake will not leave you laughing, though there is always the bracing comfort of Margaret Atwood's ruefully mischievous narrative voice to accompany you on the journey.
The novel opens with the self-named Snowman, once Jimmy, hiding in the branches of a tree like a latter-day Sweeney - ragged, wounded, dishevelled and crazed. He hobbles and scavenges his way through a blitzed urban landscape, pursued by now feral, but once laboratory-raised animals, who have been genetically inter-bred - pigoons, wolvogs, rakunks.
The world, which lies in ruins about Snowman's blistered feet, is the world Jimmy grew up in. He is one of the privileged ones - a compound kid whose father works for a pharmaceutical company. Outside lie the pleeblands, where the unchosen, the great unwashed live, and the law of the urban jungle applies. Jimmy and Crake are boyhood friends who end up working together on a mysterious project devised by Crake to create human clones, who can feed on berries, follow the mating rituals of baboons - coming into heat only every three years - who cease functioning at 30 but who suffer none of the dread of death since that part of their brain function has been bred out. Crake's vision is of a world where there is "no more unrequited love . . . no more thwarted lust; no shadow between the desire and the act".
Oryx is a shadowy figure. She begins as a picture from the Web, downloaded by Jimmy and blossoming into a full-blown sexual fantasy figure for him. But then she materializes as a flesh and blood person at the RejoovenEsense plant where Jimmy and Crake work. We get to learn some of her history - a child slave sold in a third world country, transported to the city to sell sexual favours to tourists. Finally - several pimps later - she is transported to the US and works as a service prostitute on one of the compounds before finally being "rescued" by Crake.
As with much futuristic fiction, Atwood's aim is to be cautionary. The future is here, she seems to be saying, and it ain't pretty - sex tourism, plastic food, student "auctions", web sex, catastrophic genetic meddling. There is the particularly eerie sensation of reading about the huge bonfires of animal carcasses redolent of the recent foot and mouth epidemic - but rendered here as a long distant memory from Jimmy's past. Atwood's dark wit in the naming of things - BeauToxique beauty treatment, for example, or the pharmaceutical compounds with their cheerily dyslexic logos - OrganInc, HelthWyzer, AnooYou - make you both laugh and smart with recognition. Crake, the cream of the academic crop, goes to the Watson-Crick university, whereas Jimmy is reduced to the downbeat Martha Graham Academy for the Pictorial and Plastic Arts. In this brave new world, art is the bottom of the pile.
Sound familiar? But Margaret Atwood's novel begs the question - is it too late for satire in a world that is already teetering on the brink of the cruelly absurd? Her future is so close to the preposterous logic of early 21st-century capitalism that Oryx and Crake reads more like documentary than imagination.
That said, Atwood's take on this world is utterly compelling. But the people in this world are more troubling. Snowman, Oryx and Crake's hold on their own environment is so tenuous that they barely register in the reader's imagination - they remain oddly flat, like one-dimensional virtual beings.
While this may well be Atwood's point - that an over-controlled technological world distorts and reduces our humanity - it makes for a curiously bloodless novel. The message seems too bare without human clothes. It is not that one wants redemption for these characters - in this world, it's too late for redemption - but it's that one can barely summon up enough feeling to even wonder about their fate. The horror of the world they - and Atwood - have created eclipses them. Therein lies the health warning - perhaps we cannot identify with these people, because they are no longer really human, but mere cobbled-together pieces of genetic information.
Oryx and Crake
By Margaret Atwood
Bloomsbury, 367pp. £16.99
• Mary Morrissy is a novelist. She is a visiting professor on the University of Arkansas's creative writing programme