I just finished rereading it and honestly, the character work left me kinda cold this time. Atwood's so focused on building the chilling bio-logic of her world and the thematic parallels between Jimmy and Crake that Snowman/Jimmy felt more like a vehicle for ideas than a fully realized person. His 'development' is mostly a slide into despair and regret, which fits the book’s bleak tone, but I never felt I understood his core beyond his reactions to the world collapsing. Crake is deliberately opaque, more a force of nature than a man, and Oryx is a mystery seen through two distorted lenses—that’s the point, but it makes for a reading experience that’s intellectually gripping and emotionally distant. The characters are chess pieces in a brilliant, horrifying game, and while I admire the craft, I didn’t find myself attached to any of them in the way I do in other dystopias.
Maybe that’s the intended effect—to mirror the dehumanization of their society—but it makes the book a harder recommend for readers who need that deep character connection to stay invested. It’s a masterpiece of world-building and warning, but not one of intimate portraiture.
Most reviews I’ve seen land somewhere in the middle, praising the thematic consistency but wishing for more from Oryx. The consensus seems to be that Jimmy’s journey from a somewhat shallow youth to a broken, reflective survivor is well-executed, if bleak. Crake is widely acknowledged as a fascinating intellectual antagonist rather than a deep personal one. Oryx is the common critique—that her symbolic weight can feel frustrating, leaving her character feeling thin. Overall, the opinion is that character serves the novel’s brilliant, terrifying ideas, sometimes at the expense of deep emotional engagement. A necessary trade-off for that kind of story.
I completely disagree with reviews that call the characters underdeveloped. They’re not underdeveloped; they’re developed in a totally different register. Jimmy’s entire arc is about the failure of traditional ‘development’ in a world stripped of meaning. His nostalgia, his pathetic clinging to art and words, his weakness—that is his character, and it’s painfully real. Crake is the terrifying evolution of pure rationality, and his ‘flatness’ is a deliberate character trait, the scariest part about him. He’s not meant to be relatable.
Oryx is the biggest point of contention. We only see her through Jimmy and Crake’s fantasies and projections, which is exactly how the world of the book sees her: as a symbol, a victim, an object. The fact that she remains an enigma is the book’s brutal commentary on how we consume people, especially women. The character work isn’t about growth; it’s about excavation, decay, and revelation of a pre-existing rot. It’s some of the most effective, unsettling character writing I’ve encountered precisely because it refuses to give you easy emotional handles.
2026-07-14 11:35:32
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