Oryx & Crake by Margaret Atwood

I have at last come to realise that I have a strange love/hate relationship with Margaret Atwood's books. I think I've only read one that I particularly enjoyed and a number that I have actively not enjoyed and yet I just keep going back and reading more of them! I think the problem is that she writes well but I don't enjoy what she writes. So I'm not saying they are bad books as such. Just not for me.
When I started Oryx & Crake it was quite a relief - I have been reading some dubious NZ fiction mixed in with the first three Harry Potter books for the last little while. Although I love the HPs, I was craving something a little more grown up and the dubious NZ fiction was not fulfilling (note: this is not a comment on all NZ fiction, I have been taking a rather random approach at the library to selection of NZ authors and have only read a small proportion. I'm sure there are excellent authors out there, they just haven't yet fallen under my random sample...). So it was with some pleasure that I read the first few chapters. However. I then spent the next 200-250 pages wondering if I really wanted to read this book at all. Should I just give up and take it straight back to the library? It wasn't grabbing me, I wasn't enjoying it, I wasn't particularly interested in the characters... But somehow, I thought I ought to finish it. I don't like leaving books halfway through as an active decision so I kept going. Somewhere between 250-300 pages in, I reached the point of deciding that yes, I did want to finish this book. The main reason being that it had hinted at horrible things that had happened so much that I decided I wanted to actually know, as I suspected it wasn't going to be as bad as my imagings. So finish it I did. And it deed, it wasn't as horrid as I'd imagined. So in that respect, I was glad I'd finished it. But I'm still sorry I started it.
I'm aware this hasn't gone much into the plot (civilisation as we know it destroyed by some evil thing someone did...one person left alive, bemoaning his part in the unfolding. Sort of.). This is mostly because it is rather to complex to explain and if you did want to read it one day, I think something would be lost on the way by knowing too much to start.
Would I advise anyone to read it? If you enjoyed the Handmaid's Tale, yes. Otherwise, probably not. I shall do my best to remember in future that I don't actually like her books...