My introduction to Margaret Atwood was Life Before Man, an austere and emotionally chilly novel from 1979, which made me fall in love with the Royal Ontario Museum before I’d ever set foot inside. Because dinosaurs. It was on my stepdad’s bookshelves, alongside several other literary works that have had an enduring impact on me: a book of essays and meditations by Madeleine L’Engle; works of theology (since he was a United Church minister) drawn from multiple religious and spiritual traditions, including feminist approaches; Joy Kogawa’s Obasan.
And at least four Atwood novels, most likely Christmas gifts from congregation members, because they were all first-edition hard covers, and his annual stipend was tiny and didn’t stretch to lavish editions. So because of my stepfather, who was one of the best things that happened to my family, I read Life Before Man, followed in quick succession by Survival, Atwood’s guide to Canadian literature, Surfacing, Bodily Harm, and–the year it came out–Cat’s Eye, which still inhabits me. I several years past an experience of school bullying initiated by my jump from Grade 5 to Grade 7, when we moved to Ottawa and my new teachers discovered I was two years ahead of the Grade 6 curriculum in math. This was a source of some consternation to the Ottawa school board, in those days. What were they doing over the river in Quebec, teaching algebra to impressionable young children?
So a ten-year-old girl went into a class of twelve-year-old hormonal girls and … chaos ensued. At least for me. Reading Cat’s Eye was the most revelatory experience I’ve had of of turning to fiction for understanding.
Conversely, Life Before Man, which I read at around age 12 (which is almost certainly too early–I was hoping for more about dinosaurs and museums) is a love triangle, of sorts, albeit a rather passionless one. Nate and Elizabeth are unhappily married and not particularly likeable or (and I say this with retrospective knowledge, now that I’m older and have read Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina) interesting.
But Lesje, a name I’m still not sure how to pronounce, embarks on a relationship with Nate (oh, why?) and she’s interesting.
She works at the ROM with Elizabeth, and one of my teenage take-aways from this book was that it’s a good idea to avoid romantic entanglements with colleagues’ spouses.
Another retrospective insight is that Lesje needed to focus more on paleontology, and less on Nate. So, yes, even in retrospect I would like more about dinosaurs in thisnovel.
I’m amused by the Wikipedia rundown of the plot: “Elizabeth, said to have been inspired by Shirley Gibson, ex-wife of Atwood’s partner Graeme Gibson,[1] also takes a lover, Chris, who recently committed suicide.” That introduces a whole gothic twist characteristic of Atwood, but of course it’s not quite what happens. The relationship with Chris is pre-suicide, not posthumous.
From there I moved on to The Robber Bride. Isn’t Zenia kinda a revision of Lesje, but a pathological liar instead of earnest?
Then Cat’s Eye, still my favourite, and then all of Atwood.
Really, all of it. I’ve read every poem, story, essay, and novel. I am a serious Atwood watcher. I look forward to catching glimpses of her in the wild, on the streets of the Annex.
In grad school I selected Atwood’s Alias Grace, a book which alternately fascinates and infuriates me, as the core of my dissertation research. I published an article based on that chapter and, as we speak, I am doing copy-edits for a chapter in the new MLA volume on Teaching Atwood. I wrote on Atwood’s long and complicated relationship with Shakespeare, and I had a lot of fun and a lot of help from Shakespearean friends writing this chapter. Did you know the Shakespeare Association used to playfully refer to their annual conference as #ShakeAss? But they’ve reformed.
I’m teaching “The Stone Mattress” as part of a women’s lit course. Thinking about the story from a classroom perspective has made me reflect on it as a murder mystery, and Atwood is very, very good on murder. There’s a whole academic analysis of her work as murder fiction, and it’s worth a read. Jackie Shead makes an important point here, one that Atwood herself has repeatedly invited.
Thought experiment. What if the 1960s poet/short story writer/aspiring novelist and nascent literary critic had, instead, decided to write thrillers? I’m a bit sorry this didn’t happen.
Here’s the opening line, which is delicious: “At the outset Verna had not intended to kill anyone.”
Within a few paragraphs we learn that “she’s had enough of men for a while,” since she’s now both emotionally and financially set. Yet she can’t help appraising the male fellow passengers on her cruise to the Arctic, with the caveat that she ignores the ones accompanied by clinging wives. “Prying a spouse loose can be arduous, as she discovered via her first husband: discarded wives stick like burrs.”
Verna thinks she might “knock one off,” by which we understand that she means seduce, and perhaps fleece, one of the solo men. But it is an ambiguous expression.
I really like Verna, because she mocks Tennyson, who’s been on my mind. “‘Though much is taken, much remains,’ she murmurs to her image in the mirror. Her third husband had been a serial quotation freak with a special penchant for Tennyson. ‘Come into the garden, Maud,’ he’d been in the habit of saying just before bedtime. It had driven her mad at the time.”
Well, that’s fair.
She introduces herself to one of several men named Bob, and we learn the name once had a special and disturbing resonance for her. As always, names matter in Atwood, and Bob praises Verna’s own name. “‘Old-fashioned,’ she says. ‘From the Latin word for ‘spring.’ When everything springs to life again.’”
I’m thinking of the young, intellectually disabled, and very avid murder victim in Alice Munro’s “Child’s Play.” A Verna whose name invokes not spring but disgust: “. . . the name Verna, I dislike that. It doesn’t sound like spring to me . . .” Hmm. Is Atwood conscious of this parallel? I wonder. Because here’s Atwood’s Verna reflecting on her name:
“That line, so filled with promises of phallic renewal, had been effective in helping to secure her second husband. To her third husband she’d said that her mother had been influenced by the eighteenth-century Scottish poet James Thomson and his vernal breezes, which was a preposterous but enjoyable lie: she had, in fact, been named after a lumpy, bun-faced dead aunt. As for her mother, she’d been a strict Presbyterian with a mouth like a vise grip, who despised poetry and was unlikely to have been influenced by anything softer than a granite wall.”
Granite wall.
Stone mattress.
Poetry is soft, and Verna is hard.
We’re getting the picture, and as always, Atwood tightens the screw. “During the preliminary stages of netting her fourth husband, whom she’d flagged as a kink addict, Verna had gone even further. She’d told him she’d been named for “The Rite of Spring,” a highly sexual ballet that ended with torture and human sacrifice.”
So where, precisely, is this encounter with Bob leading?
I hate to give it away, but Bob will not be making it off the cruise ship at the end of the trip. Because many years ago he did something to Verna, and it’s time for him to pay. Five decades later, encountering him unexpectedly is enough to make her rush to the bathroom to vomit, because her memories of trauma still live in her body.
But Bob is entirely unconscious. Charming, wealthy Bob has not a care in the world. He’s likely gone through life wrecking younger, poorer, vulnerable women like the teenage Verna, and he has not been held to account.
And now he will pay.
It turns out that Verna is a bit of a serial killer, albeit a kindly and non-interventionist one, who merely let her wealthy husbands indulge their gourmand tastes until they dropped dead.
Bob will need to be dispensed with more efficiently, and Verna is up for the job. With the aid of an unwitting young geologist, she should be able to dispose of the murder weapon and escape scrutiny or suspicion.
“. . . the stromatolite will sit on the geological samples table and will be picked up and examined and discussed, acquiring many fingerprints. At the end of the trip it will be jettisoned. The Resolute II will travel for fourteen days; it will stop for shore visits eighteen times. It will sail past ice caps and sheer cliffs, and mountains of gold and copper and ebony black and silver gray; it will glide through pack ice; it will anchor off long, implacable beaches and explore fjords gouged by glaciers over millions of years. In the midst of such rigorous and demanding splendor, who will remember Bob?”
The story ends with Verna wondering if she’ll get away with it and thinking, and yet once more, of Victorian poetry. “Calm of mind all passion spent, as her third husband used to say so annoyingly after his Viagra sessions. Those Victorians always coupled sex with death. Who was that poet anyway? Keats? Tennyson? Her memory isn’t what it was. But the details will come back to her later.”
The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction 