Moreover, the pacing felt wrong at the end. Atwood spent so much time, so many pages building up the suspense of the apocalypse, and then, it just happened. There was nothing dramatic, nothing entertaining, just dying and dying for a couple of pages while Jimmy hides in a hole. Crake and Oryx left, and then returned. Sure, there was blood on their clothes, but no mentioning of what happened, no explaining whatsoever. If Crake planned to kill Oryx all along, why didn't he do it outside, not in front of Jimmy's eyes? When Jimmy saw Crake kill Oryx, even if he had his suspicions of Crake, why couldn't he have waited a bit longer for Crake to explain his motivation?
As I was reading, I began to like Oryx and Crake for its strange world and the various connections to ours. However, the ending of it is really bad in my opinion. Maybe I have been careless in my reading and forgot obvious clues the author had been planting, but the ending just doesn't leave a satisfying echo in my mind. Some people may prefer the open-ended approach, in which anything is possible. However, I am not one of them.
hm. too bad you feel that way. Sometimes, though I loved reading a novel and then came to the ending and was disappointed, I am left wondering the point of an author choosing a particular resolution. I came to the conclusion only recently that...that's life. Because we're so used to happy endings and pat endings in t.v. shows and movies and media tends to feed us what we want, I am thinking it's okay for an author to choose an ending that is not entirely satisfactory for the reader. This reflects life I think. We can't decide how our lives will play out; nor are we always happy at how it ends.
ReplyDeleteI thought the whole point of reading novels, especially fiction, is to find something other than life's misery. I don't mind reading tragic novels, although I would prefer not to, but this ending isn't that. The ending is not tragic, just incomplete and an awkward way to cut off an otherwise interesting novel.
ReplyDeletewell, it depends also on how you think the world should end: with a bang? or a whimper?
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