I really struggled through the first... three-quarters of this book? The ideas were interesting and I wanted to watch things happen in this world, but that wasn't how it went down. It does starts picking up around page 300 or so, though.

The book is nominally about Snowman, the survivor of an apocalyptic plague who's living in ruins trying to help care for a group of genetically engineered transhumans known as Crakers. I was interested in this story, and I wanted to know what will happen to the Crakers, but the book consists almost entirely to flashbacks into Snowman's past, when he was known as Jimmy.

Jimmy's life is chronicled from childhood up until the aftermath of the apocalypse, and his close friendship with a man known to him as Crake gives the reader insight into the ongoing collapse of the planet and of society, especially the wild excesses of biomedical and biotechnological megacorporations that eventually leads to the apocalypse. The ideas here are interesting, but throughout the flashback sections that actually make up the meat of the prose, I kept wishing we'd get back to Snowman's present and find out what happens after the apocalypse.

There's also something bizarre about the way Atwood presents Jimmy's internal thought process that doesn't click. She writes his narration in what seems to be an unbelievably self-aware way - not in the sense that he's being ironic about himself, but in the sense that the narration seems to be classifying and psychoanalyzing him at the same time as it tries to present his subjective self-perceived mental life. It's weird and muddled.

That said, I do want to know more about how the Crakers and the other survivors will make their way in the apocalypse, so I think I'll still go read The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam later to round out the trilogy. I just hope they don't tease a present storyline and bury it in flashbacks, and that the characterization is a bit more consistent.