Inside the Frame of The Robber Bride

Now that I’ve finished a few of her books including The Robber Bride, I’ve noticed another trend in her work that is structural that goes against a lot of what the commonly accepted wisdom is when it comes to writing.

First point about commonly accepted wisdom is that it is just that: common. Ultimately there are no rules in telling a story as long as what you do works. Writing’s fun that way. At the time of posting this, I am almost through my fourth book by Atwood, Cat’s Eye, and it was here that I put together a consistent structure she uses in her novels (or at least the novels I’ve read so far).

In this structure, there are two dominant storylines. The first and usually the less important, is the storyline that takes place in the present where the main character or characters are taking action based on a development that has come about due to how the second storyline ends. The second, more dominant, storyline is the character’s backstory that leads them to this moment. In Oryx and Crake the character of Snowman takes limited action throughout the novel while reflecting on his life and the time he spent with the books titular characters. In The Handmaid’s Tale, which, to be fair, demonstrates a more interwoven set of storylines, the narrator goes through her oppressed existence as a handmaiden while reflecting on the world before and what she lost to get her here. And in The Robber Bride the main storyline is that of Roz, Charise and Tony, who encounter the woman who devastated their lives and brought them together. They proceed to confront her in series of interviews and then the story resolves fairly ambiguously. The second storyline that dominates the book in terms of tension and actual text is the backstory of each character and how they met and were betrayed/abused by the antagonist Zenia.

It’s a framed narrative, essentially, but it is also fairly passive.

If characters take action in Atwood’s novels, they don’t do it overtly. A great amount of time is spent cataloguing a character’s thoughts and detailing what makes them the person they are. Most often characters react to actions taken against them, and when they do choose to act it is in small, deliberate ways. What is paramount, it seems, is a character’s inner life, which I feel shouldn’t work but does. There were large sections of story in The Robber Bride where nothing had really happened. I knew the outcome of each story through context and I was just seeing it through. In the case of Tony, I know that Zenia is an impediment in her relationship but given that she is with the man she wants to be in the present, the action has no overt consequence. But that is just it, a lack of overt action does not mean there isn’t a great deal of movement going on under the surface and the way that Atwood details that motion is exact and really engaging.

After reading The Robber Bride I got to thinking about how I structure my own stories and found that I too employ framed narratives almost exclusively. There is a lot to learn here, but I think a good place to start is how much attention Atwood places on getting a character from one perspective to the next.

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