Summary: One of the last, maybe the last, human recounts the end of the world.
Last year I listened the audiobook of Margaret Atwood’s famous, and excellent, Handmaid’s Tale. Oryx and Crake is also a dystopian novel, but a very different one.
Both were narrated by a single character. Handmaid’s Tale is from a woman that is at the bottom of the power structure and trying to survive and more of a political story.
Oryx and Crake tells a story about the end of the world but it is more environmental and maybe evolutionary. But my biggest problem with the book is that I really had no idea what was going on with the book until about halfway through the book. The main character is describing a world and his experience of it, but we really don’t know who he is, what the world is or why everything so bad.
About half way through the book the reader starts to understand that the narrator was somehow involved, but we do not really know the extent, or what really happened until the end of the book.
From what I understand the second book in the series takes a totally different perspective and tells the story again, this time from the outside of the power structure.
I cannot really say I enjoyed this book. I almost stopped reading a number of times. It was a library book, so I had a time limit for my reading. And in some ways that probably made me work harder to finish. But also I was interested completing in the trilogy because of the very good reviews of the third book. The second book is on hold from the library. So I will try it out, but I doubt I will be as tolerant if that book also meanders around for half the book.
Oryx and Crake Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook