Reading Margaret Atwood as an adult is like reading CS Lewis as a child. For me, there is something addictive in their style of writing, their command of narrative, and in the detail of the worlds they bring to life. When a Margaret Atwood novel comes into my hands I tend to gobble it up, in the way I would gobble up the Narnia novels when I was a child. But it would be a disservice to both writers to describe them simply as page turners.

Oryx and Crake had me reading past lights out. The split narrative between now and then, which is Atwood’s signature narrative technique, builds up expectation and tension. You know, from the first page that things are askew (aren’t they always in an Atwood novel?).

Snowman, the narrator-hero of the novel, is washed up at zero hour in a post-apocalyptic future, where bio-technology has been used to destroy humanity and Snowman is the last man. The narrative is a challenge of backwards induction: you read to find out how we ended up at the start. This takes skill to write, but also allows the skillful writer to answer the reader’s questions with imaginative labyrinths, narrative red herrings, distracting and informing tangents, emotional cul de sacs, sleight-of-hand clues.

Atwood’s ‘speculative fiction’ (she prefers the term to science fiction) is seductive. The combined force of a characterisation ripe with human idiosyncrasies and a narrative that locks the reader into its intricacies can make you forget what is being said here. Between gasping at momentary beauty in the description of a caterpillar - ‘a luscious, unreal green, like a gumdrop’- and choking at the inventive audacity of the Dungeons and Dragons type Blood and Roses game - one Mona Lisa for a Bergen Belsen - you can become blind to the bleak view of humanity presented.

The world is full of harmless nuts, psychotic geniuses, hopeless radicals, rampant capitalists and cynical dupes. No one has any sense of control (apart from one who is cooking up a hot-bioform with necrotising properties). We are all so far into ourselves and our materially altered, genetically modified world, that we can’t see where we are and what we are doing. Snowman’s jaded genius best pal, the eponymous Crake, decides that humanity is going nowhere fast and it would be better to scrap the blueprint altogether, and so brings about Armageddon. (Snowman continually and willfully misses the point until it is way too late.)

There is the real possibility of reading this novel as a hoorah for the anti-technnology, anti-progress, and anti-humanist lobby. It is too intelligent for that. But the intensity of apathetic, air-locked humanity crying in the wilderness at its own lack of agency is poignant and despicable in equal measure.