Review: "Oryx and Crake" by Margaret Atwood

From Goodreads:  The narrator of Atwood's riveting novel calls himself Snowman. When the story opens, he is sleeping in a tree, wearing an old bedsheet, mourning the loss of his beloved Oryx and his best friend Crake, and slowly starving to death. He searches for supplies in a wasteland where insects proliferate and pigoons and wolvogs ravage the pleeblands, where ordinary people once lived, and the Compounds that sheltered the extraordinary. As he tries to piece together what has taken place, the narrative shifts to decades earlier. How did everything fall apart so quickly? Why is he left with nothing but his haunting memories? Alone except for the green-eyed Children of Crake, who think of him as a kind of monster, he explores the answers to these questions in the double journey he takes - into his own past, and back to Crake's high-tech bubble-dome, where the Paradice Project unfolded and the world came to grief.

With breathtaking command of her shocking material, and with her customary sharp wit and dark humour, Atwood projects us into an outlandish yet wholly believable realm populated by characters who will continue to inhabit our dreams long after the last chapter.
My Thoughts:  This was a really weird book.  It kind of made me want to meet the author just so I can ask her how the heck she came up with this stuff.  The characters are creepy and odd and the storyline is so plausible that it is a little scary.  I did not like any of the characters and I kind of felt like that was the point.  The novel takes place in a future society where science is king and the goal is to create the best anti-aging, anti-fat, anti-death products and medications.  But Crake, Jimmy's psycho friend, takes it one step too far.  Most of the story is told in flashbacks; Snowman/Jimmy is remembering how the current world came to be and how the old world crumbled but there is a lot of back story and the author doesn't reveal any telling information until the last 70 pages.  That was kind of annoying because I found myself thinking, 'okay, let's get to the point already'.  I felt like the book was almost a satire showing how gullible humans are and how people can manipulate that gullibility with disastrous results and that in itself was scary.  This is the first book in a trilogy but I am really not sure if I care enough to read the next book.  3 stars.