My Atwood Project, Part 3: Bodily Harm

Atwood’s fifth published novel, Bodily Harm, returns to the formula? pattern? established in the first three. A woman, Rennie, is torn between two men: boyfriend Jake, similar to the bland and egotistical Peter of The Edible Woman, and Daniel, the doctor who operated on her breast cancer. While her relationship with Jake focuses on the physical, with dark allusions to the violent options that men have over women, her relationship with Daniel is chaste. The good doctor is married, and won’t have the affair Rennie desperately wants. 

I want to dispel the notion that this is a “romance” novel, or at least not as I understand the genre, though that’s the genre insisted upon by the cover and blurb on my mass market paperback copy. Rennie has had part of a breast removed. Boyfriend Jake makes a valiant effort to continue to want her, but fails. Dr. Daniel is unwilling to provide physical connection. Finally Jake leaves and a stalker leaves a coiled rope on Rennie’s bed. Rennie, a freelance writer, proposes a low-cost working escape: an article about (fictional) Caribbean island St. Antoine. There, she does indeed have a fling, and finds physical connection -- but also much more that no one really wants to find on vacation, or in a romance novel.

(As usual, SPOILERS AHEAD)

Rennie makes her first connection on the plane, to another good doctor, Dr. Minnow. She soons learns that “They’re having an election, the first since the British pulled out,” and the local doctor is running for office. Rennie’s hopeful jaunt becomes a menacing trip to an impoverished island divided over politics, and it gets worse. I won’t try to sum up the details of the election, but suffice it to say that nearly everyone is playing Pin the Tail on the CIA.  

Rennie does hook up, with Paul, a drug runner. Then the election happens, and the post-election mob, and Rennie is thrown in prison with Paul’s accomplice and former lover, Lora. Rennie is in shock and denial at first: this can’t be happening! To a Canadian journalist! But it is. And now the portions of Lora’s backstory scattered throughout the narration make sense: these are stories that Lora shares with Rennie in prison. 

Perspective shifts. The vague political unrest of the first three novels now takes center stage. Two white women become cellmates; Lora is raped and beaten. Rennie’s man problems and breast problem shrink in the shadow of her “am I going to get out of this prison alive” problem. Atwood visited the Caribbean island of St. Vincent many times, and based this novel on stories she was told by a man who became Prime Minister. Rennie is lucky to get out alive. 

This novel, to me, is a precursor to The Handmaid’s Tale. Not only are the women imprisoned and abused by the “natives,” but even “good guy” Jake makes a joke of how vulnerable women are. The women must create their own solidarity, sharing their stories and caring for each other. Both are stories of government gone wrong, both inspired by real-life events.

Next up, the early short stories.