Read and Appreciated in 2003
A Year’s Best List
Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood
(Nan A. Talese, 2003)
“Science fiction,” Samuel R. Delany once wrote, “is a tool to help you think,” and Margaret Atwood’s stunning new novel (possibly her best since The Handmaid’s Tale) wants us to think about the implications of bioengineering and, by implication, what it means to be human. In a near future where sunshine is poison, the weather’s gone crazy, and botched genetic experiments roam the blasted landscape and trashed-out safe compounds the rich once inhabited, Snowman (née Jimmy) believes he may be the last Homo sapiens on earth. He lives with a small tribe of childlike mutants engineered for beauty and social harmony by his boyhood friend, the wildly bright and amoral Crake, in the wake of a hemorrhagic plague designed to euthanize humankind so nature can (with a little help) get things right. Slowly unraveling, Snowman drifts through this post-apocalyptic world hearing voices from his past and remembering his unhappy childhood in those compounds, his conflicted relationship with Crake, and his obsession with Oryx, a child prostitute he discovered one day on a kiddie-porn website who, through a series of implausible coincidences, follows him through life. This psychologically rich, philosophically dark, acidically satiric, and spiritually despairing novel challenges us repeatedly to contemplate the possibility raised by one of Snowman’s former acquaintances: “Maybe there weren’t any solutions. Human society… was a sort of monster, its main by-products being corpses and rubble.” No wonder Atwood explains her religion, Pessimistic Pantheism, as the belief that “God is everywhere, but losing.”
Buddha: Kapilavastu & The Four Encounters, Osamu Tezuka
(Vertical, 2003)
Osamu Tezuka is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the headbangingly popular comic books known as manga. Born in 1928 in Osaka, he grew up on Walt Disney (he saw Bambi 80 times) and the Fleischer Brothers (Koko the Clown, Betty Boop, et al.), and took in innovative German and French films during his medical-student days. He soon turned his back on a career as physician, though, and, by the early ’50s, dominated the manga scene. When he died of stomach cancer in 1989, Tezuka left behind more than 150,000 strips, several extraordinarily influential anime (Astro Boy among the best-known), and one manga masterpiece: Buddha.
Tezuka eschewed the flat, static representations found in traditional manga. In their place, he introduced such dynamic cinematic techniques as multiple camera angles, close-ups, and jump cuts. Rather than thinking of manga as simple stories that could be contained within a few panels, he conceived of them as sprawling narratives that could easily exceed a thousand pages. He preserved traditional manga’s iconoclastic impulse while adding serious themes to a genre already a lot more comfortable in its relationship to sexuality and bawdiness than its American counterparts. The upshot is an art form that at its best rivals the novel in its structural complexity, character density, and thematic sophistication. Antecedents to contemporary manga (Japanese for “whimsical pictures”) extend back more than a millennium to the chojugiga, satiric scrolls drawn by Buddhist monks in the sixth century depicting anthropomorphic animals acting like less-than-model humans. But Tezuka more than anyone is responsible for the form’s proliferation in the second half of the twentieth century. Siddhartha isn’t born until three-fourths through the first volume of a proposed eight, Kapilavastu. Its dovetailing story focuses instead on Chapra, a slave committed to moving up the social pecking order, and his growing friendship with Tatta, a smartass street urchin with magic powers.
