The narrator is Jimmy/Snowman, the same person at different points in time. The main timelines are Jimmy's childhood, spent in closed-off "compounds" made up of employees and families of biotech companies (as opposed to the "pleeblands" that make up the rest of the country), and sometime after Jimmy is a grown man, when he's known to himself and a group of clone-type humanoids as Snowman, and is the only or one of the few survivors following some sort of worldwide plague. Clear enough?
The book alternates back and forth from Jimmy to Snowman, and eventually the early timeline catches up with where the later timeline began. Atwood does an excellent job of doling out information slowly and ominously. Jimmy, who is a bit of a dope, doesn't intend to hurt people but does plenty of that anyway, even though he has some glimmer of a moral compass. Crake is flat-out brilliant and has high-minded ideals, but has an extremely dark side. They end up in a love triangle focused on Oryx, a former child porn actress from somewhere that sounds a lot like Southeast Asia. Things are never great anywhere, but they get so, so much worse as the book's dual timelines converge.
Oryx comes across a lot like a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and the book doesn't pass the Bechdel Test as far as I recall, which is weird for a book from a female author. And the criticisms of genetic engineering come off as a little heavy-handed, although chillingly rendered. Overall, it's an extremely engaging book that left me extremely pessimistic about any hope that humanity might have for reversing the death spiral that we find ourselves in. The only remedy that Oryx and Crake seems to see is to accelerate and steer into the skid, which, if this book is any indicator, will have catastrophic results.
