My Atwood Project, Part 18: Old Babes in the Wood, and Cut and Thirst

This last (for now?) collection of fifteen short stories, Old Babes in the Wood (2023), is bookended with a few stories about Nell and Tig, who are stand-ins for Atwood and her long-term partner Graeme Gibson, as she explains in the memoir -- see my post on Moral Disorder. 

"My Evil Mother," also issued as a standalone ebook in 2022, continues with the exploration of Atwood's mother figures. As most are, this one is cool and practical, but also maybe a witch. The story ends with you asking yourself about the fictions that parents create in order to protect their children. 

"Impatient Griselda" imagines a quarantine where  humans are helped by aliens who look like octopuses. The alien tells a quarantine group the story of the Griselda sisters: Patient Griselda marries an abusive noble, while Impatient Griselda follows her and works in the kitchen until she can seize her moment. When one of the humans questions this version of "Patient Griselda," which only has one young woman in it, the alien entertainer defends their version. A delightful example of strangemaking.

Another example is “Metempsychosis: Or, the Journey of the Soul” which “corrects” misconceptions about reincarnation by telling of a snail reincarnated as a customer service representative. What could they possibly have done to deserve this?? Also, note that neither the extraterrestrial nor the snail fits into binary male/female categories.

Two stories about historical figures, George Orwell and Hypatia of Alexandria, imagine interviews with them from beyond the grave.

One of the most intriguing stories is "Freeforall," which imagines a different way that the situation in The Handmaid's Tale could have gone. In both worlds, fertility is declining. Here, the cause is a rampant virus. The solution is Houses, which raise uninfected children and trade them for marriage. The Freeforall is an area in each city where infected people must live, much like the pleeblands in the MaddAddam series. 

For Atwood, writing about the dead often means writing about what they read. Atwood's farewell story to her father in Moral Disorder includes his enjoyment of a book about a failed expedition; here, her farewell to Graeme, “Wooden Box,” includes his enjoyment of the French inspector Maigret stories. “A Dusty Lunch” is a tribute to Graeme’s father, and includes letters and poems from his war days. 

"Airborne: A Symposium" introduces us to the trio of Chrissy, Leonie, and Myrna, who will reappear in "Cut and Thirst" (2024) which I found much more entertaining. In this latter story, an ebook standalone, the three aging women friends rally around Fern. When Fern left a self-important old white male out of her anthology, he and his cronies punished her with literary criticism. Don't they deserve to die? Or at least to eat Ex-Lax brownies?

The collection is a lovely mix of Atwood staples: the autobiographical, the speculative, strangemaking, contemporary women, historical figures, retelling of a fairy tale. I hope it’s not her last, but if it is, it’s an excellent representation of her breadth and talent.

I've reached the end of my fiction rereading project, and will post on my reflections soon. Stay tuned!

My Atwood Project, Part 17: Ban, Ban, Caliban!

Interesting that both of Atwood’s longer retellings, The Penelopiad and Hag-Seed, were commissioned, even though Atwood dabbled in the form in several short stories, such as “Bluebeard’s Egg.” I don’t count The Robber Bride as a retelling of “The Robber Bridegroom,” because it strays so far; perhaps “inspired by” is a better label.

While my reaction to The Penelopiad was lukewarm, I love Hag-Seed. Perhaps because I have taught The Tempest and am more familiar with that play than with the Iliad, which I am mostly familiar with through my Latin AP study of the Aeneid. What I love are the perfect parallels between the original and the adaptation, and the fact that The Tempest is actually going on inside Atwood’s retelling of The Tempest. Let me explain.

Felix Phillips is a successful director and is planning a production of The Tempest. However, his right hand man Tony is tired of being delegated to, and conspires with the board to get Felix fired. Tony, of course takes over. Felix goes into exile alone but for the ghost of his dead daughter Miranda. Starting to see the parallels? One of the cleverest is "Estelle," a woman with some pull in the government, who personifies the role of auspicious “star.” See what she did there? 

Felix gets a job teaching Shakespeare in a prison. Atwood says, in Book of Lives, "I set the book in a prison because everyone in The Tempest is imprisoned in some way." After a few years of establishing himself, Felix is ready to stage that production that he was never able to finish, and get his sweet revenge at the same time. The theme of prison appears also in Bodily Harm, indirectly in The Handmaid's Tale (the handmaids are not technically incarcerated but they are far from free), and very directly in The Heart Goes Last. 

It’s a delightful romp -- my only complaint is that the revenge goes down a bit too perfectly, but in order to mirror the happy ending of the play, it must, so there we are. If you are not familiar with The Tempest, Atwood includes a summary at the end, or watch the film version with Helen Mirren as Prospera, a female incarnation of the lead role, and Russell Brand as a hilarious Trinculo.

And we're nearly done! One more collection of short stories, and one more uncollected short story.

My Atwood Project, Part 16: The Heart Goes Last

The Heart Goes Last is another speculative novel. I can't quite say post-apocalyptic, because the disaster is less extreme than in Oryx and Crake, and there is no regime change, as in The Handmaid's Tale. Nonetheless, the catastrophe in the background is a financial crisis, and those are plenty apocalyptic for many people. Our two main characters, Charmaine and Stan, have lost their home and are living, if you can call it that, in their car. Charmaine hears of a new pilot program with job training and persuades Stan to check it out. 

The pilot program is the twin cities of Positron and Consilience. Consilience is a small town with a '50s vibe where Charmaine and Stan can move out of their car and into a home with a real bed. The catch is that every other month they leave the comfy house to their “Alternates” and spend four weeks in the Positron prison. Everyone has a job in both places, prison and town, so everyone is fully employed. 

Before officially signing on, Stan visits his aptly named criminal brother Con, short for Conor, and Conor warns him that no one comes out of that place alive.

I have to say I did not enjoy this book as much as Atwood’s other speculative work. I didn't find the world building as absorbing or detailed and I didn't like the characters as much. Granted, the MaddAddam series had three books in which to do the world building. But even if we just consider the second book, The Year of the Flood, I found the rituals and characters in the God's Gardeners community much more convincing than the faceless inhabitants of the twin cities. I also found the MaddAddam characters, especially Zeb and Toby, three-dimensional, whereas I found Stan to be a “Flat Stanley,” and Charmain no deeper. 

*Spoilers ahead*

We do get a couple of tantalizing glimpses into Charmain’s childhood, but no definitive revelation. Was she molested, and blamed for it? Does this explain her willingness to perform the gruesome prison job of “putting down” the less tractable prisoners in her own gentle way, so they suffer less than she did?

This book veers into the sexual in a couple unusual ways. One might think that when the couple returns to a more or less normal home that their marriage would resume as usual. However, they both become sexually obsessed with an Alternate, someone who occupies the house while they are in prison.

In MaddAddam, the Scales and Tails strip club is more or less what we would see today, with some extra attention to costumes. However, one of the big money-making secrets of the twin cities project is prostibots, or sex robots, customizable of course. And beyond that, top dog bad guy Ed is working with a shady company in Las Vegas to transform a person through laser brain surgery into a sex slave. The person's memories of prior love objects are erased, and they imprint upon the first face they see when they awake from surgery, preferably the person who ordered up the memory wipe. This just seems kind of gratuitous and less plausible Atwood’s usual fare. 

But to end on a positive note, this is an interesting critique of the American prison system and its disproportionately large role in the economy. Corporations are already running prisons for private financial benefit. Take away the laser sex slaves and it reminds me of 1984, a gritty and and in some ways realistic take on a totalitarian future, with a hapless couple caught in the center, forced to make impossible choices.

My Atwood Project, Part 15: Stone Mattress

This collection of “wicked tales” was published in 2015. Atwood takes pains to define “tale” as less true than “story”: “We may safely assume that all tales are fiction, whereas a ‘story’ might well be a true story about what we usually agree to call ‘real life.’” 

The first three are interconnected. "Alphinland" is about Constance, who has recently lost her husband but continues to converse with him; she especially wants to know if he had that affair, like she suspected he did. The title comes from her successful fantasy series, which supported them; C. W. Starr, her nom de plume, seems to be an amalgam of J. K. Rowling and Atwood herself. Atwood's characters often write “subliterary” fiction (her word; see the romance novels in Lady Oracle, for example) to support themselves. Does she actually consider any of her work to be pulp?

“Revenant” switches to the point of view of Constance’s ex, Gavin, and his young wife, Reynolds. He regrets not marrying Constance, and tells Reynolds so. But no time to hash it out, as Reynolds has arranged for him to meet with Naveena, who is writing about his work, or so Reynolds says. In point of fact, she’s writing about Constance, and Gavin is just someone who knew her before she was famous. 

The third story, “Dark Lady,” takes place after Gavin’s death. Jorrie and her twin Tin, fka Marjorie and Martin, learn of Gavin’s funeral, and Jorrie, who was with Gavin after Constance, wants to go and gloat. She hopes Constance will be there…and of course she is. 

“Lusus Naturae” was written for a collection of “strange tales” edited by Michael Chabon, and continues in the undead-ish vein of Happy Zombie Sunrise Home.

“The Freeze-Dried Groom” and “The Dead Hand Loves You” are delightful little horror gems. In the first, a man who uses storage units for drug deals, and whose inner monologue imagines him as a murder victim, discovers a chilling cache, and gets to play out his fantasy. The second reminds me of the first three intertwined stories: a young writer who can’t pay the rent jokingly contracts with his housemates to share the proceeds of his next book. It’s a surprise hit that ties them all uncomfortably together, and he contemplates murdering the people siphoning off his riches. 

“I Dream of Zenia with the Bright Red Teeth” is a return to the characters from The Robber Bride, but with a more sympathetic reading of the man-stealing antagonist Zenia.

The title story is a chilling tale of murder and revenge. When Bob raped 14-year-old Verna, he ruined her life, and set her on a path to seducing older men, then sending them off a little sooner than necessary. She’s plotting to do the same to a man on her cruise -- but he turns out to be Bob. Her revenge is perfectly plotted, using an aptly named piece of fossil called a “stone mattress.” 

Finally, “Torching the Dusties” is about a movement that would scale up Verna’s approach by ridding the country of folks in retirement homes. 

My Atwood Projet, Part 14: The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home

The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home (2013), Atwood’s first publication after the conclusion of the MaddAddam series in 2013, is a quick fun read, a novella that I could only find on Wattpad, in the form of a blog. Is it by Naomi Alderman, author of The Power, and dedicated to Atwood, as the Wattpad blog states? Or was it coauthored by the two of them, as the book cover image suggests? Alderman is mentioned in the memoir as a mentee of Atwood’s, whom she chose because Alderman was not “in awe” of her.  

Happy Zombie alternates between two points of view, that of Okie, a young girl whose mother-turned-zombie has just eaten her father; and Clio, Okie’s grandmother, to whom Okie must now bring her zombie mother for safekeeping. Clio is a familiar Atwood trope: an older woman with a secret and a dim view of the young, like Iris in The Blind Assassin. One might assume that the younger Alderman wrote Okie’s sections, and Atwood wrote Clio’s. 

The plot takes a couple of twists and turns as Okie heads out on her quest to deliver her subdued mother, with the help of delivery driver and love interest Hughes. Clio waits for her granddaughter at home, reflecting on her husband’s experimental anti-Alzheimer’s energy drink, “Glowing Skull,” that launched the  Zombiepocalype.  

If you haven’t read Alderman’s novel The Power (2017), you should. She dedicates it to Atwood and her partner Graeme Gibson. The novel has been compared to The Handmaid’s Tale, and I see Atwood’s mentoring influence, especially in the frame story. The male author of the book, a historian, presents it as “the most plausible narrative” of the time when women gained physical power over men, in the form of electricity generated in organs called “skeins” near their collarbones. This physical power allowed women to control and even rape men, flipping the power dynamic and leading to the situation of female dominance in the frame story. The male author who has researched and written this history appeals to his female mentor for help publishing it; she proposes that he publish under a female name, since no one is likely to believe such an incredible claim coming from a mere man.

This conceit reminds me of the way both The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments are presented within the frame narrative of an academic conference, which reassures us that Gilead did not last, but also casts some doubt on the narratives.

My Atwood Project, Part 13: Moral Disorder

This is the third of three short books that Atwood published in the six years between Oryx and Crake (2003) and the second book of the MaddAddam series, The Year of the Flood (2009). I was looking forward to rereading Moral Disorder (2006) because my favorite Atwood story, “My Last Duchess,” is in it. What an eye-opener to find that every single story (or chapter?) is autobiographical to a certain extent. 

As Atwood says in the memoir: "It’s a mix of Nell and Tig stories—these two characters would appear later in Old Babes in the Wood, and they bear more than a coincidental relationship to Graeme and me—and stories of childhood…. The last two stories, however, are valedictions. A valediction is an act of bidding farewell. The first valediction, ‘The Labrador Fiasco,’ is for my father, who had died ten years before. The second—’The Boys at the Lab’—is for my mother..."

In fact, this seems like a practice memoir, or a first draft of one. The full title is Moral Disorder and Other Stories, and each section has a title on its first page, but in the the table of contents they are simply labeled with chapter numbers, as if it were a single narrative rather than a collection. The title comes from a novel that Graeme started but never finished.

Chapter 1, “The Bad News,” is a Nell and Tig story, which begins in the present and then transposes them to Roman times to show how the more things change, the more they stay the same.

The next four stories are about Atwood’s childhood and youth, all with analogs in the memoir. 

• In Chapter 2, “The Art of Cooking and Serving,” first-person narration, Atwood as a child prepares for the birth of her sister Ruth. It’s an anxiety-inducing time, as their mother is older than is usual -- forty-two, we learn in the memoir.  
• Chapter 3, “The Headless Horseman,” also first person, is about a Halloween costume passed from Atwood to younger sister Ruth.
• Chapter 4, “My Last Duchess,” also first person, is about Atwood’s final year in high school and early boyfriend. I love it because I can relate both to young Margaret, a strong student with a boyfriend, and also to the English teacher, as I became one later. I also love the title poem, which I have taught, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which they also study. 
• Chapter 5, “The Other Place,” first person, recounts in a vague and general way Atwood’s restless first years out of college. 

In Chapter 6, “Monopoly,” we return to the Nell and Tig stories. This is about when Atwood was officially introduced to Tig and Oona’s (Graeme and Shirley's) children as Graeme’s new -- girlfriend? The narrator decides during the story that Oona/Shirley considers her a governess, a glorified babysitter. All this harks back to Life Before Man, the fictionalized story of Graeme’s disaster of an open marriage with Shirley, before committing to Atwood.

 

In Chapter 7, “Moral Disorder,” we continue with Nell and Tig, and all the animals on the farm: how they are acquired, and often, how they die. Considering all this come and go in the animal world leads Nell/Atwood to the realization that Tig/Gibson does not want to marry, or for Nell to have children

Chapter 8, “White Horse,” is also in the Nell and Tig framework, but it’s mostly about Atwood's sister Ruth, called Lizzie in the story, and her mental health struggles. When Atwood let Ruth know that she’d have a chapter in her memoir, Ruth replied, “I don’t actually need one, it's all in Moral Disorder.” 

In Chapter 9, “The Entities,” Oona/Shirley insists that Nell/Atwood buy her a house. Then she dies in it. Again, it’s all real, and in the memoir.

Chapter 10, “The Labrador Fiasco,” returns to the first person, and tells of Atwood’s father’s decline. It contains a story within a story: Atwood’s mother is reading to him an account of a real expedition to Labrador in the Canadian wilderness. The expedition is a fiasco, due to inadequate knowledge and poor preparation. Atwood’s father gleefully imagines how he would have done better. I view this as a reflection on his life as a man who was a successful wilderness trekker.

 

Finally, Chapter 11, “The Boys at the Lab,” continues in the first person and tells of Atwood’s mother’s decline. I found the connection to these “boys,” the students who assisted Atwood’s father, intriguing. I get the impression, from the many cold and abandoning mothers in Atwood’s work, that her mother was not as warm with her children as she was with other adults, that perhaps she regretted leaving behind an independent and unconventional life to become a mother. 

My Atwood Project, Part 12: The Penelopiad and The Tent

I have a degree in comparative literature, so you might think that I love retellings, as they permit the reader to compare the same story from different points of view, or in different time periods. But I honestly haven't found that many that I like. I couldn't even finish The Wide Sargasso Sea, about the mad woman in the attic from Jane Eyre. But perhaps my soft spot for Jane is too soft. I also love Pride and Prejudice too much to be interested in P & P & Zombies. Go ahead and call me a reactionary in the comments.

I did enjoy the retelling of The Iliad in The Song of Achilles (2011) by Madeline Miller, which recounts the siege of Troy from the point of view of Patroclus, Achilles' closest friend and possible lover. Here in The Penelopiad (2005) we have another retelling of The Iliad, this time from the point of view of Penelope, left behind in Ithaca as her wily husband Odysseus goes to wage war in Troy for ten years, then spends ten more years coming home. Penelope as a young bride reminded me of Iris in the Blind Assassin: listening to her lover’s stories, and being bossed around by the actual woman of the house, with little to do but give birth, preferably to a son.

Atwood also calls attention to the maids that Odysseus and his son unjustly killed upon his return, when he also killed the suitors who were vying to claim Penelope. Why did he hang them? What had they done, besides sleep with or be raped by the suitors, which they had very little choice about? Atwood calls it at one point an “honor killing.” This focus on the treatment of servants, especially female ones, recalls Alias Grace, which also examines how servants are treated as disposable sex objects for the upper classes. 

Toward the end of the short novel, which consists mostly of Penelope’s first-person narration, interspersed with song and dance from the maids, is a chapter titled "An Anthropology Lecture," where the maids offer a metaphorical reading of the incident. The symbolism of twelve maidens, led by a thirteenth in the form of Penelope, could be argued to represent a formerly matriarchal culture, represented by the thirteen lunar cycles, being taken over by the patriarchy. Atwood is also careful to point out that Odysseus taking his young bride to his home was counter to the prevailing tradition of the husband moving in with the bride's family and contributing the bridal gifts to her household. 

Penelope alternates between telling the story of what happened in her lifetime, and relating encounters with other souls in the underworld. Most of them avoid her except the fatuous Helen. In the short fiction collection The Tent (2006), "It's Not Easy Being Half Divine" presents a short retelling of Helen's side of the story in a modern setting. "Salome Was a Dancer" does the same, portraying Salome in seven layers of cheesecloth rather than seven veils. In "The Nightingale," Philomena and her sister Procne speak of the horrifying husband who mistreated them both. The treatment of women in myth was definitely a topic preoccupying Atwood at the time.

The Tent begins with "Life Stories," a sort of anti-memoir about letting go of the past, “taking it apart,” to become only a whisper. This made me smile, as the whole reason I'm doing this project of rereading Atwood is because of her lengthy, detailed memoir. She claims in The Book of Lives that her publishers talked her into it. 

The title story is a metaphor for writing. The writer is compared to a refugee in a tent, who is compelled to write the story of the vast, cold world around her on the inside of her tent, even though she may attract the attention of those who wish to harm her. 

The pieces are short and experimental, often in the second person, often about writing, like the title story, and "Plots for Exotics," in which a character wants to audition for a protagonist role but is told she may not because she's an "exotic."

The collection has much more in common with Good Bones and Murder in the Dark than with her more traditional short stories, which make their return the same year, 2006, in Moral Disorder.

My Atwood Project, Part 11: The MaddAddam Trilogy

 (Just a reminder that these blog entries do not purport to be thorough analyses or even proper reviews. They are just my musings upon re-reading Margaret Atwood’s fiction after reading her memoir.) 

I again broke the rule of chronology by re-reading the MaddAddam trilogy together, though the three novels were spaced apart thusly: Oryx and Crake was published in 2003; The Year of the Flood in 2009; and MaddAddam in 2013. Still, nothing like the 34 years separating The Handmaid’s Tale from The Testaments. And, as she did in those two books, Atwood again takes pains to remind us that her fiction is based on events and ideas from the real world. 

Origin: Atwood began the book on a worldwide trip that started in Australia, after an observation that the Aborigines never changed because they had everything they needed. So could we use gene modifications to change what we need? She also chose to tell the first novel from a mainly male point of view, after being asked many times why she “always” wrote about women. 

Title characters: Oryx and Crake is named for two would-be architects of a new world. Crake, once known as Glenn, is a gene-splicing genius who wants to create the ideal human: immune to war and overpopulation, among other improvements borrowed from existing species. Oryx is Crake’s lover and accomplice, and the center of a love triangle with Crake’s comparatively dimmer friend, Jimmy. 

Plot: The book begins at what seems like the end of the world. Jimmy, now calling himself Snowman, thinks he may well be the last human, or at least the last Human, version 1.0. The only other…people he’s aware of are Crake’s creations, Humans 2.0, whom he calls Crakers. They have no possessions, not even clothes; they eat leaves, so they don’t have herds or crops or territory; and they only have sex when the female is in “season” -- once every three years. 

AS USUAL: SPOILERS AHEAD!!

We learn that as Crake was developing his new race, he was also sending Oryx around the world to give out samples of a fun new drug, BlyssPluss. What we don’t learn until much later is that Oryx was also spreading a plague engineered to destroy the OG humans and clear the playing field for the new team. Crake and Oryx die together, and Jimmy is left holding the bag…of new people. 

The world building is good and thorough, but not entirely original. The Corporations and their live-in campuses are strongly reminiscent of Neal Stephenson’s Enclaves, which appear in several of his novels, such as Snow Crash (1992) and The Diamond Age (1995). The idea is that corporations will need to secure themselves and their employees from headhunting and secret-stealing, so gated communities evolve into their own self-sufficient mini-cities. 

The spread of an engineered virus to wipe out humanity harkens back to the movie “12 Monkeys” (1995), though I’m sure it’s appeared elsewhere. 

Predictions: Atwood foresaw technology being used in many ways that it is being used today, such as “digital genalteration” (deep fakes). However, she has college kids staying in touch via email, not knowing about texting yet. It will show up in the other two books. 

Parallels: Atwood’s favorite plot devices, love triangles and abandoning parents, make their appearances here. Jimmy sees the mother who abandoned him for her ethical beliefs on a TV news segment, much as Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale saw her mother in a documentary about a pro-choice rally, during her re-education. 

While the first novel sets up the end of one race and the birth of another, from the point of view primarily of the scientists and corporate employees, The Year of the Flood takes place for the most part in the “pleeblands,” where everyone who is not part of a Corporation lives. Here we meet my favorite characters, Toby and Zeb, who are important members of God’s Gardeners, an eco-religious group preparing for the “Waterless Flood.” 

The God’s Gardeners seem oddly prescient regarding the coming plague, until we understand that they have become a haven for apostates from the Corporations. Toby, though, is just an ordinary pleebrat, rescued from an abusive boss. Zeb, on the other hand, has an extremely interesting past (magician’s assistant! eater of a bear!), which is recounted in great detail in MaddAddam. 

When the plague hits, Toby is in hiding from that abusive boss again, and is able to quarantine safely: much of The Year of the Flood takes place in the AnooYoo spa (I love Atwood’s brand names), where Toby is holed up eating things like Lemon Meringue Facial. Another important character is Ren, who was already in quarantine in the strip club where she works, Scales and Tails, due to a torn “biofilm.” 

In MaddAddam, pleebs and scientists must work together. They discover that the scientists that Crake “recruited” to create his perfect humans were actually “scooped” against their will. We get Zeb’s amazing backstory, and the genesis (haha) of God’s Gardeners. It is the least satisfying book to me, though, because the big plot points are past and this third part feels like tying up loose ends. 

However, I love the series as a whole, especially the first two books. They tackle the big questions: what does it mean to be human? How would you re-design humanity, if you had the chance? And finally, will Crakers and OG humans be able to hybridize? I can’t spoil that one for you, because it’s left unclear…perhaps a fourth book is in order, Ms Atwood? 

My Atwood Project, Part 10: The Blind Assassin

The Blind Assassin is Atwood's second novel-length foray into historical fiction, after Alias Grace. The historical part of this novel stretches back into World War I, through the Depression, then winds up with World War II, for which Atwood was alive.  

Here is my post from reading this novel during my project of reading all the Booker prize winners. 

It's a difficult book to sum up. The skillfully woven strands are these:

• the point of view of older sister Iris, chronicling her family's secret-filled past 
• a novel by the more idealist younger sister Laura, revealing those secrets to the world after her death by suicide
• Laura's novel includes a science-fiction saga imagined by young leftist Alex Thomas
• and newspaper articles about events at large, and the family's involvement

I can't say much more without SPOILERS, so BE WARNED.

Iris, writing from a bird's eye view in the present day, is similar to Aunt Lydia in The Testaments, filling in the history and explaining her own development from naive teen bride to cunning old woman (though Lydia seems to have never been very naive).

There are two secret cruxes: who is the unnamed young woman visiting Alex? Iris, or Laura? At first we think it's Laura; she's the one who skips school, who has a crush on Alex, who hides him when he is suspected of setting fire to her father's factory. But as the novel moves on, and Iris marries her father's rival Richard Griffen, our attention is drawn to the expensive wardrobe of the young woman, clothing that Laura would have scorned. Also, bruises that Iris's husband inflicted. We begin to suspect that Iris is Alex's lover; but is Laura also seeing him? Because Laura is pregnant, or claims to be. Then who is the father of Laura's baby? I'll leave that question unspoiled.

Another layered aspect to this story that I remarked more on this reading is the veiled meaning of the sci-fi story. It is actually an allegory for the love affair between Alex and the young woman. There is a secret plan for a palace coup, a group of rebels ready to invade (Alex's leftist buddies), and at the center of it the blind assassin (Alex) and the voiceless maiden (the young woman). The assassin is diverted from his mission by his love for the young maiden; the real life lovers propose their own solutions to the dilemma. Sadly, neither solution comes to pass.

It's a beautiful read, cunningly plotted, and a worthy winner of the Booker Prize - Atwood's first; The Testaments would be her second. Next comes the MaddAddam trilogy, starting with Oryx and Crake, another favorite of mine.

My Atwood Project, Part 9: Alias Grace

 Alias Grace is Margaret Atwood's first novel-length foray into historical fiction. However, it has a lot in common with her first speculative novel, The Handmaid's Tale, since both are primarily about incarcerated women. Alias Grace is inspired by the true story of a 16-year-old housemaid, Grace Marks, accused of murdering the head housekeeper and their employer, with the help of another servant. There was much doubt about her guilt, raised in part by Grace's own conflicting accounts. While the male servant was found guilty and hanged for the murder of the employer, Grace's own death sentence was converted to life in prison, and she was pardoned much later.

**My thoughts on Alias Grace are primarily about an important plot twist, so just skip this post if you don't want to know the crucial reveal.**

First, the title is a spoiler once you reach this turning point. During a hypnosis session, Grace speaks with a different voice and claims to be her dead friend Mary Whitney. It would appear that Mary committed the murders, which would account for Grace's fainting fits and her claims to remember nothing of the crimes. So the title would mean that in addition to Grace using Mary's name as an alias during her brief time on the lam, Mary used Grace's body to commit the murder of housekeeper Nancy Montgomery. 

The slippery part that Atwood leaves unresolved is whether the hypnosis session is authentic. Is Grace actually suffering from dissociative identity disorder, formerly referred to as multiple personality disorder? Does she really harbor Mary Whitney as an alternate personality? This illness usually comes about after serious trauma. Was waking up with Mary dead next to her after her failed abortion sufficient trauma to cause Grace's personality to split? Charis in The Robber Bride also has a split personality, but hers is a reaction to incestuous rape, which is a more usual triggering factor. 

Another possibility is that Grace and Jeremiah the peddler aka Dr Jerome Dupont (another alias), the supposed hypnotist, cooked up this scheme together. He is an experienced mountebank. He knew Mary and much of what she and Grace went through, so he could have coached Grace to pretend to be Mary and lay the blame on her. He seems genuinely surprised and shaken during the session, but we know he is a good actor.

A third possibility is Reverend Verringer's immediate diagnosis, that Grace is possessed. In this case, the novel slides from historical fiction into supernatural fantasy. The explanation would be that when Mary died, Grace did not know about the superstition which says to open a window, and so Mary's soul was trapped in the room with Grace, and occupied her body. The novel is full of such superstitions and omens, as is often the case in Atwood's writing. For example, Cat's Eye brushes up against this type of religious fantasy, when Elaine believes that the Virgin Mary has rescued her from her bullies.

Atwood does not purport to resolve this historical mystery, but she does introduce a fascinating wrinkle: what if this famous case of amnesia was actually a case of dissociative identity disorder? This disorder was discussed at the time, as Atwood affirms in the afterword. She will go on to incorporate historical fiction into her next novel, and first Booker winner, The Blind Assassin. Stay tuned!