Short Review: This is a great book, but the audio version has a flaw that really annoyed me. I want a re-cut, just for me, sans music. I doubt I’ll get it.

Long Review: I love the book itself, perhaps even more than I loved Oryx and Crake. Atwood is one of my favorite authors, and I’m intrigued by the world she is creating in these books. The second book particularly appeals to me because it focuses much more closely on the female characters trapped in this terrible future Earth Atwood considers. As much as I loved the first book, I wanted to throttle the protagonist, in part because he was so dismissive of the women and girls he knew. Campbell Scott’s fantastic narration made me like Jimmy/Snowman in the audiobook much more than I liked him on paper. In this book, following the female characters was less frustrating, but more importantly, it struck closer to home. Women fair differently during revolutions and social collapses, and I can’t help but wonder how the women are doing whenever I read an account of a war or revolution or a dystopia. Atwood scratched that itch for me with this book.

Atwood has a chance to flesh out this future Earth more clearly with the second book, and the picture she paints continues to be damn near terrifying. We learn more about people Jimmy knew before the waterless flood occurred, and we see how people are managing to survive. Since we’re following the women of the greater story, we particularly see the nasty conclusion of the erosion of women’s rights–Atwood stuck a pin right into one of my hot-spots with that one.

The main characters of this book are Ren, a young exotic dancer, and Toby, an herbalist. Both are members of God’s Gardeners, an eco-cult, for some portion of their lives, and both manage to survive the “waterless flood” set off in Oryx and Crake. Ren is younger and more innocent, Toby older and more street-wise. Both survive through a combination of luck and intelligence, and both suffer greatly. It’s not light, this book, but it’s thoroughly good.

The narration is good throughout, and I think all three narrators did an excellent job. I was annoyed by the continual mispronunciation of the name “Nuala,” but tried to convince myself that in this terrible future, society had so collapsed that no one knew how to say that beautiful Irish name (which has only two syllables). The readers all pace themselves well, and the three voices work together nicely and help to denote changes in speaker smoothly but clearly.

What made me grit my teeth, though, is the music. The damn ill-considered, inappropriate music. Several sections of the book end with songs. I’m fine with that on paper, but in the audiobook, they’re bad. Really bad. And they’re not bad in an understandable “well, I’ve never been a fan of religious music, but that still makes sense” way. They’re disconnected from the audiobook in a way they just can’t be in the paper book, because the problem is in the arrangements and production. The songs follow sermons for the God’s Gardeners. In the paper book, I think the reader assumes that the songs are sung by the congregation that just listened to the sermon. But as things start to collapse around the world in the book, nothing changes about the arrangements of the songs. Nothing. As electric grids stop functioning and people begin protecting themselves in any way they can, the over-produced soul-less quasi-Christian rock doesn’t alter. WHY? Seriously, what is with that? I decided to skip the horrid, non-diegetic music to make it through the rest of the book, which I otherwise loved.

I’m sure I’ll listen to the book again, but I’m also sure I’ll skip every single song when I do. I wish someone with a truly abiding love of music had given more thought to the inclusion of these songs in the audiobook, because they’re so wrong-headed.

Short Review: Atwood’s Governor General’s Award-winning bildungsroman about girls’ cruelty to other girls, art, childhood, and memory; read crisply by Barbara Caruso. The book follows Elaine Risley, an artist, as she remembers her youth in Canada while preparing for a retrospective of her artwork. It is heartbreaking and beautiful, which makes it hard to listen to at times. Pain is perhaps more real when it’s expressed out loud–this isn’t a fun listen, but it’s a very good one.

Long Review: I love this book, and it breaks my heart over and over again. I hate the concept of “chick lit,” but I do believe there are certain books that speak so clearly of girls’ and women’s experiences that they are ours to read and know–this is one of those books. In a way, I worry about who reads it, because I don’t want anyone to use this sharp, brilliant novel as proof of how evil girls are to other girls. Atwood deserves better, and girls and women deserve more credit than that.

Caruso was well-cast in this role. Her reading is never sappy, never self-pitying. She is a journalist reporting on her own youth and life, and she’s as hard on herself as she is on Cordelia, her nemesis and friend. Elaine repeatedly points the failures of her own memory–as a young adult, she had forgotten about her friends’ cruelty to her. As she ages different things trigger painful memories to resurface, and she is forced to realize that she tolerated intolerable things, and to wonder why.

The book is structured as a series of flashbacks, which is perhaps the only way to accurately portray the reflection on and reclamation of childhood memories by adults. The flashbacks are entwined in a story of Elaine’s preparation for a retrospective gallery show of her art. Elaine as a child is fragile, confused, and off-kilter much of the time. As an adult, Elaine seems solid, organized, and confident in most things. She pieces her memories together with a thesis in mind, it seems, and has no trouble convincing us of her victimization and recovery. I find it particularly intriguing that Atwood and Caruso conspire to make us fall so totally for this character who isn’t trying to elicit sympathy or demand justice. Elaine just states the truth of her memories and moves forward, interested in making sense of her experience without wallowing in it. We should all aspire to be such memoirists.

The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus

Author: Margaret Atwood

Reader: Laural Merlington

Short Review: Margaret Atwood’s retelling of a portion of The Odyssey in Penelope’s voice, her contribution to the Canongate Myth Series, read by Laurel Merlington.

Long Review: I am a mythology nut. A buff. A, well, obsessive kook. I know this. I’m fine with this. And when I learned that I had missed the bus–that this series of books was underway and that it kicked off without me–I felt like I had caught someone kicking my dog.

Atwood, of course, retells Penelope’s story with a wonderful feminist twist. Atwood’s Penelope stands up for the maids, and criticizes her wayward husband and disingenuous suitors. She argues that her supposed beauty has long since faded, and that all of the men in the story are arguing over her for entirely unromantic reasons.

Laurel Merlington’s narration is engaging, sharp, and humorous. Her method of voicing the chorus is a bit shrill at times, but that seems fitting considering the messages they carry.

This was a good listen–I burned through it in an afternoon of puttering around my studio, and immediately missed my Ancient Greek companions. I look forward to listening to more audio books from the Canongate Myth Series.

Oryx and Crake
Author: Margaret Atwood
Read by: Campbell Scott
Short Review: A dystopian “speculative fiction” (Atwood’s term) novel tracking a young man’s experiences in pre- and post-apocalyptic world, complete with a ridiculously sheltered genius caste, chaotic plebe lands, corporations run amuck, transgenic species, genetic engineering and cloning to the nth degree, a new, broken Eden, with a side of crushing love-triangle thrown in for good measure.

Long Review: Atwood is a genius. You knew that already, right? Because she is.
Lanea and Atwood sitting in a tree, R. E. A. D. I. N. G. . . .

Campbell Scott reads the work beautifully. I could listen to his voice for hours, and I did. Having listened to the novel, I’ll have a hard time if anyone other than Scott is cast as the protagonist in a film of the novel one day. Scott’s voice is so appropriate for this novel in particular because he can flatten the affect of his voice so convincingly. As narrator, he is presenting the description of the world’s decline and collapse, narrating the story leading up to the big bad end, and also speaking for Will, the heart-broken kid who grows into a heart-broken adult, who winds up a heart-broken nanny to some very odd, er, humanoids.

The novel itself is beautifully written, engaging, terrifying, sad . . . I didn’t read this book on paper before listening to the audiobook, and I worried that I might miss something. I didn’t. Scott’s narration was entrancing for me, and I ended up listening to most of the audio book a second time because I just didn’t want to put it down.

Oryx and Crake