This book kind of irks me. Having read it twice now - once for a course in university, and once because I wanted to see if I still disliked it - I can at least say that I don't think it's the book, it's me.

Oryx and Crake has five-star prose. The way Atwood writes is just fantastic, so even when I'm dealing with piles of other junk I can keep reading.

It has four-star worldbuilding. The dystopia presented is believable - probably moreso now than when the book was published - and the details all seem to slot into various thematic messages that peek out throughout the book. The development of the Crakers and how Snowman tries to teach them about the world is most of the reason I wanted to keep reading. A few details are a bit dated, but on the whole everything develops wonderfully.

Speaking of theme, I see the thematic development as about three stars. There's a lot of environmentalism, anti-geneticism, anti-consumerism, and probably a slew of other anti-things that I'm probably forgetting. These things are prevalent throughout the book, to the crazy density of the literary short stories that we were forced to read in high school, and that's great. But in the end, it feels like most of the themes are frayed threads that never quite terminate properly. The apocalyptic scenario is so blatantly wrong that it doesn't really give us any finality, it just causes some of them to fizzle. Sure, environmentalism is important and consumerism is ruining the planet and giving pigs human brains might be a bit extreme... but also starting from zero with a race of superhumans isn't exactly a reasonable way to deal with that. This is a book that discusses a lot of important issues really well, and then in the end says "and if we do nothing we'll probably kill ourselves." Which is a perfectly reasonable stance, it's just a bit of a sucker punch in novel form.

I don't really enjoy the way the plot is laid out, so I'd give that two stars. I don't think it's actually a problem with the book, I just don't enjoy the sort of non-linear flashbacks with fairly slow pacing. Honestly, I can't think of how I'd rather this was story told, I just didn't enjoy it. C'est la vie.

The crux of my dislike is really the characters. Solid one star. Jimmy is an awful protagonist. Snowman's basically fine, even if he's unreliable as all hell and technically the same person, but following Jimmy through life is just horrible. He barely seems to see other people as people, he barely does anything, he barely cares about anything. Anytime something vaguely interesting happens in his life it's because of Crake. He demonstrates basically no agency. We watch Jimmy get drunk and screw housewives while he works some marketing job that barely matters to him or us and generally whines about getting old. Quite honestly, Jimmy is a totally realistic person whose life story is just not interesting in the slightest outside of what Crake pushes him into.

Yet the worst part of having Jimmy as a protagonist isn't Jimmy, it's how he sees everyone else. In his eyes, no one else seems to be much of a person, more of a cardboard cutout who gets classified as lover, family, friend, or unimportant. From his middle-school flings to his relationship with Oryx, they all could practically be copy-pasted on top of each other in how he interacts with them and how they interact with him. Even Oryx, who he actually cares about, doesn't seem to be any different. He sees Crake as a friend, and for the entirety of their lives he pretty much treats Crake the same way even when he's clearly long since gone off the deep end. He both loves and doesn't care much for his mother, father, and eventually Ramona, with his mother getting a special spotlight mostly because she manages to develop into a nice little source of trauma for him.

Sometimes I would think that this would be much more interesting if it jumped between Snowman and Crake's POVs, but I'm pretty sure Crake sees people the same way, so probably no help there.

Unfortunately, this is all written with such clear care and attention that I can't even be upset about it. I didn't enjoy it much, but I have more respect for Atwood than ever before. If anything, I'm upset with myself for not liking this book.

So, lacking a great way to plot "I really disliked it but it was great" on a five-point scale I'm just gonna slap two stars on my review and call it good enough.