Ratings: 5 Stars

This book took me more than a year to finish.

It was the damn monologue. I can’t seem to stand monologues and descriptions and references that I don’t understand unless I read the latter part of the story. At a stretch I could only read a couple of chapters before putting it back in the rack. Then again, I would take it out, read a chapter, despair and then put it back. I had the same issue in ‘Handmaid’s tale’ as well. For me, conversation and action keep the pages flying. I, almost as a rule, never read books that are acquired taste. But as a wannabe science-fiction writer and in my pursuit to appear more intellectual than I am, I wanted to explore all that is considered as great in fiction. So, I persisted.

Somewhere around 30%, ‘Oryx and Crake’ started getting interesting. The pigoons and wolvogs, the gene-splice and the living rocks – slowly and miserly, Margaret Atwood began to reveal her amazingly built chaos. Abstract and reticent to a fault, she would never show more than she needs to. But once I had that picture of her world in my head, I just marveled at her unadulterated imagination.

She is devastating with words. It just took two lines to spell out the climax. For me, reading is like a voice in my head narrating the story – a torrid river that gushes rapidly. Despite its size, ‘Oryx and Crake’ is a trickle, I had to savor the silence as much as the sound.

It has been a hard book to read. But having read it, it is damn satisfying.