I think I hated this book.
It was a lot like a tightly-coiled flower bud that opens very, very slowly, one tiny petal at a time, and just when you think that you might have a better view of the flower, it's wilted and died and you wonder what it would have looked like in full bloom. You'll just never know.
The plot unfolded so slowly that only by the very end of the book did I understand what was happening and why. And by then I wasn't sure I cared very much.
Even finding out who Oryx and Crake are takes most of the book.
I remember seeing other people describe this book as one of the classics of dystopian literature. "No one writes dystopian like Margaret Atwood," they said.
Well, thank goodness for that. My eyes will heal from where I scratched at them in deep frustration and I can go on reading more books in this genre without fear of becoming as annoyed again.
Basically, we follow our main narrator, Snowman (aka "Jimmy" (yes, I'm serious)) as he wanders through a post-apocalyptic wasteland, never answering questions about what happened. Occasionally we get flashbacks to another time, presumably when Jimmy was younger, eating pizza and living in a house, but it's detached from the present; it's meaningless until the events add up to the grand picture, which, again, comes by the very end. It's like two different stories, neither of which are particularly meaningful, and the fine thread that binds them together and makes them interesting is a sort of punchline that you have to be very patient to discover.
I imagine that this book would be better upon rereading, because then the dual stories would actually mean something. Frankly, though, I'd rather scratch out my eyes than go through this again.
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