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Margaret Atwood’s gift is to drop her readers into a world she has made up from the controversies of the time. In the early 21st century, we were in global capitalist Boom with divisions between rich and poor widening by the day. We had mad-cow disease, the foot-and-mouth crisis and the outbreak of SARS Covid #1. There were also heated debates about genetically-modified food and the harvesting of organs from transgenic pigs for transplant to humans. The book gives us a world where science and capitalism have joined forces to run rampant without any moral brakes or consideration for consequences. It is a satire on human attempts to play God and, inevitably, it all goes horribly wrong.

The sharp bleakness of the story is blunted by Atwood’s wit as she lampoons the great capitalist propaganda machine, Advertising. The story is scattered with neologisms describing spliced hybrid animals, chemical products and company names. We get: rakunks, wolvogs, pigoons, ChickieNobs (a brainless bird that grows ready-made nuggets on great, swollen breasts), BlyssPluss, AnooYoo, RejoovenEsense. It is a sinister version of ‘Paradice� where the wealthy live in high-security compounds and can only travel through the Pleblands in sealed bullet trains to stay safe from the vast numbers of wild and feral poor. Yet the compounds are defacto police states, intolerant of dissent from capitalist ideology whilst allowing lots of booze, violent video games and plenty of pornography, including child pornography, in order to keep the residents distracted, satiated and sedate.

When it all comes crashing down, and the pigoons and wolvogs run free as vicious predators, the folly of humanity is exposed. Only Snowman, an employee of Paradice, has survived to become the caretaker of a genetically-created race of child-like humanoids known as Crakers. They are innocent, ignorant, gullible and naked � an allegory, I believe, for the danger that emerges when humans ignore difficult truths and when that ignorance is confused with freedom from blame.

It would be a spoiler to say what causes the final rupture but suffice it to say that Atwood’s tale is prescient. Although she has her tongue in her cheek she nonetheless signals what a human future could look like if the present is unleashed from all ethical safeguards and it’s not good. I am looking forward to the second book of the trilogy.