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Finally managed to get through this book after an ill-fated first try a few years ago. I'll admit, I wasn't in the best frame of mind to appreciate it during my original attempt and thus judged it a bit too harshly. And while this time around I do not stand by my old (shallow) critiques, I have a handful of new ones that relegate this story to merely being a decent one for me.

Margaret Atwood is an extremely talented writer. There's no denying this. And I no longer have any issues with the prose itself, nor the style of writing. Instead, the bulk of my complaints with this novel come from a plot and characterization standpoint. While the genetically-engineered creatures which form the backbone of the novel are imaginatively described and are generally interesting, I can't say the same for the titular characters, nor the protagonist, Snowman/Jimmy.

Oryx and Crake feel like cardboard cutouts and are not very well fleshed-out. I never really got a sense of who they were or why they were doing what they were doing, aside from the robotic motivations of moving the plot along. Way too much of the story is devoted to portraying the seedy, borderline horrifying childhood experiences of Oryx, though the text handwaves these very realistic traumas as having no bearing on who she is as a human being, thus it's hard to form any connection with her. This goes doubly so for Crake, though I get the sense this is intentional, as he's portrayed much more pragmatically and with a touch of sociopathy. With Jimmy, we at least feel a little bit for him, thanks to neglect from his mother and abuse from his father. A lot of this goodwill towards character-building kind of goes out the window though when you have your protagonist and deuteragonist regularly (and numbly, I might add) engaging in the enjoyment of televised murder, animal cruelty, and child pornography. I get there's a lot of social commentary here, particularly centered on the Internet and how young people consume media in the digital age, but I think the point trying to be made gets lost when you alienate the reader from every character in the story. A fundamental disconnect like that fosters a disconnect from the story itself.

After doing a bit of post-read research, I see at some point, Atwood confirmed in an interview that Crake is a sufferer of Asperger syndrome. While this makes sense in retrospect, I feel the text communicates this perhaps a bit too subtly. Maybe I'm just dumb and didn't catch all the softballs being lobbed at me, but I feel making his affliction more apparent would've made Crake a little more understandable if not sympathetic, rather than the frustrating enigma he ends up as.

This next is a minor point, and one I don't blame Atwood for. However, this novel falls into a subgenre of futuristic dystopian science-fiction stories where the ruined Earthen landscape is dominated by soulless conglomerates/massive corporations wielding immense political, economic, and often governmental power. It's one of my least favorite flavors of post-apocalyptic setting, and about some of the thinnest social commentary I can think of. Yes, bloodsucking greedy corporations are the devil and literally destroying our planet. Just like real life. Hinging your book's entire world on this concept is bland, done to death, and in my opinion the literary equivalent of, "Yeah, I get it." Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is another book guilty of this, though that one at least flavored the conceit with satire.

Okay, I lied, I do have one bone to pick with the style of prose. The book reads very mechanically. It's very dry text. It reads almost like a detailed outline for a book and not the finished product. Things just sort of...happen. Nothing flows organically from one event to the next. Instead, a thing happens, followed by a stream of consciousness flashback, then another thing happens with no firm sense of time or place, ad nauseum until the book's end. And on top of everything, the plot moves at a snail's pace. It leaves enough breadcrumbs in the form of character interactions and wanting to know how precisely the world got so fucked to keep you going, but it becomes a bit of a chore by the 3/4 mark. Most plot points are summed up quickly and to the point, while the majority of the book, as I said, is dedicated to meandering, often times grating backtracks through time only tangentially related to the story as a whole.

All that said, the basics of the plot were enough to hold my interest (mostly), and I don't regret reading it. I can't say I'm enticed enough to finish the trilogy, but I like Atwood's style enough to perhaps give some of her other works a try.