Jimmy’s father continues to live with Jimmy in the compounds, and he invites a coworker, Ramona, with whom he has been having at least an emotional affair for many years, to move in.
She explains in a note that her conscience could bear it no longer. Eventually she leaves, taking Jimmy’s beloved pet Killer with her (Killer is a genetic combination of a skunk with a raccoon called a “rakunk”). His mother used to work for the corporations like his father does, but she quits in disgust at corporate corruption and greed and experimentation on animals. Jimmy’s father and mother ( Sharon) fight incessantly. The compounds are cordoned off from an outer world called the “pleeblands,” where everyone who is not employed by a corporation must live. He grew up inside a “Compound”-a community built around a corporation where rich scientists and their families live. Through flashbacks we learn of Jimmy’s childhood. Snowman invents for them a mythology in which someone called Crake is their creator and god, and Oryx, a mysterious woman who appears to Snowman’s hallucinating mind in his loneliest moments, is their caregiver and creator of all animal life. He eats some of the food he’s scavenged and stored, hears voices from the past in his head, and interacts with the Crakers, who ask him to tell stories from the past.
The novel opens with Snowman going through his daily routine. The second storyline follows Jimmy (this was Snowman’s name before the plague hit) and describes how the Crakers, the plague, and Snowman’s lonely existence came to be. The first follows Snowman’s endeavors after the human population of Earth has been wiped out by a massive deadly plague, when all that apparently remains are the Crakers (a genetically manipulated group of beings who are similar to but not the same as humans and survive easily in this environment) and Snowman himself, who watches over the Crakers and struggles himself to survive.
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