We have these people in our lives and it is a common aspect to many of Atwood’s novels whereby the protagonist’s life revolves around the greater, more active movements of another character. Oryx and Crake are the forces that drive the Snowman’s life in Oryx and Crake, and his decisions are a reaction to theirs. In The Robber Bride, Zenia is the prime mover of the three main characters’ lives. She brings them together by her betrayal and abuse of each of them and she is the glue that keeps them together. Even after her death, Roz, Charis and Tony often come back to talking about Zenia, unable to escape her.
I’m struck the most in reading when an author can articulate an aspect of my own experience in fiction that I haven’t been able to, so that it becomes immediately clear when I read it. Atwood’s description of Zenia and her effect on the protagonists did that for me. I’ve met people like Zenia, and I’ve had people in my life where I’ve definitely found myself carried in their wake, thinking about them after they’ve moved on to engage with someone else. Haven’t we all?
The construction of Zenia is important and instructive as a way to portray a villain. When we think classic villains in pop-culture we think of Hannibal Lecter, Darth Vader, and when we think about them we think about their actions on screen as they struggle with the protagonist. Zenia is described entirely through the various eyes of her victims. In pop-culture terms she’s a mix of Keyser Soze and Nolan’s take on The Joker. Zenia is a creature without hard definition. She expands and contracts depending on who is looking, telling different histories of herself depending on who she is seeking to influence and what she wants from them. She’s destructive chaos, and I think if she were left as just that in The Robber Bride she would still be memorable, but Atwood raises Zenia to legendary status by making her something else as well.
She’s honest.
The structure of Robber Bride follows like this: three characters encounter Zenia, who they thought was dead, and flee from her; each character’s backstory with Zenia is told in succession; in the present day they confront her one at a time; the story resolves (no spoilers). Most interesting here are the confrontations that occur toward the end of the novel that almost take the form of interviews. Each woman has been badly hurt by Zenia. They’ve had people they care deeply about taken from them. So when they confront her the expectation is that they will go in guarded against her. They know she lies, after all. How can a liar keep hurting you after that’s been revealed?
By telling the truth. And that’s the trick with Zenia, the part that hurts the most and the aspect that neither character can run from. Zenia sees clearly. She knows the weakness of the person she’s talking to and turns a mirror to it. She twists the knife. In many ways Zenia is just a dark mirror for each of the women she hurts and in story terms that is extremely powerful voodoo.
The Robber Bride was a book that I thought about long after reading and Zenia was the character I lingered on the most. I thought about what I would say to Zenia if I were in that hotel room and worse, what Zenia would say to me. Could I bear it, that kind of cruel, hatefully motivated honesty? I wasn’t sure. I thought about that conversation a lot. What she might say, what I wouldn’t want anyone to say but always worry that they might. The stuff you can’t share with anyone for fear that you’re the only one who thinks that way.
Powerful stuff that lingers in the mind. The hallmark of an excellent novel and a powerfully articulated character.
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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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The usefulness of an English degree is a common academic punchline, but a sentiment I’ve seen floated around that I agree with is that a degree like English, taken for the right reasons, is worth whatever you put into it. There’s a lot to be gained if you push yourself. I went into university with a very specific idea of how studying English would turn me into a better writer. The only problem is that very specific idea wasn’t subject to change, so in a space where I should have kept my mind open and maintained an appetite for new material, I mostly fumbled my way through looking for something that was never going to be there in the first place.
It’s a flaw I have. I make assumptions and decisions about how things are, how things should be, and then, like magic, it becomes internal gospel. Don’t know where I picked up this trait, but it consistently gets me into trouble, and when it comes to university, it turned my time studying English into an almost complete waste of everyone’s time (big exception for my creative writing classes with Aritha van Herk). I didn’t put the time or work in and for a while after I resented the students who did and who could converse at a level I couldn’t. It’s a chip on my shoulder I’ve had for a while now and has always been in my power to change it.
So I’m gonna. Starting with none other than Margaret Atwood.
Atwood is a prime example of how I made a sweeping generalization about both a writer and her work without even reading a single book. And given how central she is to the Canadian canon, she somehow became this totemtic figure in my own personal mythology that fed into my assumptions about the larger literary community that didn’t accept me and yadda, yadda, yadda. It goes on.
I’ve resisted reading Atwood for years with very little cause. I’ve resisted doing a lot of things. But that changes now, and for the rest of this month I’m going to investigate and explore her work. I can’t cover all of it, but I think by the time I’m through I’ll have gone through a decent selection.
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I’ve always had a hard time reading Canadian literature. In the past I’ve resolved this by simply reading other books.
I don’t know where this reputation came from, how this opinion of mine was formed, but somewhere in University (or maybe even a little bit before) I came to the understanding (or was told and believed) that Canadian writers weren’t that much fun. They could write, sure–some of them could write beautifully–but the stories were hard, tough things, full of hard edges. Some of this turned out to be true. In the few classes I took on the subject, I read a number of books with very doomed characters leading very interior, very defeated lives. The immigrant experience was a focus of one of these class, so there was a great deal of race/gender stuff going on. And like in life, that rarely goes well. If it does, it’s most certainly not fun. Also, I think three out of the five novels heavily featured incest, which led to a running joke of mine that you couldn’t call a book Canadian unless you had one family member having it off with another. I even put a story of it into Wonderfull to feel part of the group.
I don’t come to books to be depressed, although some of the best books I’ve read have left me shaken. I remember finishing Cormac McCarthy’s The Road on the bus in to work one morning and just feeling ravaged by what I’d read. I looked out the window as the city rolled by, the empty streets, and I just felt hollowed out. I remember specifically staring at the ads on the bus and wondering, given what I’ve read, what does anything really mean. I know, I know. A bit dramatic. The point is it was a tough read, but also compelling. The toughness came in the content but I was with the characters the whole way. I cared for them. I wanted for them. Which made the good parts better and the bad parts more painful.
Before I write off Canadian writers, though, let me say that there’s been plenty of novels and authors that I’ve really enjoyed. This is not really a blanket statement about the state and content of Canadian writing as it is about my assumptions and limited experience with it over the years. Like I said at the beginning, I simply read other books. I put my toe in this Canadian lake and found it too cold. I headed off for warmer climes, not wanting to know if I could go polar.
Margaret Atwood holds a very specific place in my internal pantheon when it comes to how I’ve come to think about Canadian writing over the years. Except for The Penelopiad, which I read shortly after finally getting around to The Odyssey, I hadn’t read any of her books. Which is shameful for an English grad, I know, but there it is. Despite not reading her novels I had a very definite opinion on who she was and about the quality of her work. Again, I am prone to assumptions. I don’t know what information this opinion was based on. I didn’t like her whole sci-fi vs. speculative fiction sentiment. That rubbed me the wrong way. The point is, if I’m being honest, I didn’t like her and saw her as part of the problem I had with Canadian writing without a) reading her work and b) reading much of the work of other Canadian writers.
So I decided to change that. I’ve had this opinion about Canadian writing for so long, it deserves to be challenged, and to that I’ve started off by reading Atwood. She was at the forefront of this invented opinion anyway, so it seems a likely place to start, and the book that I’ve decided to start with is her 1993 international bestseller, The Robber Bride. I’m currently two hundred pages in and already finding it different than I had imagined. I had tried to read one of her earlier novels, Surfacing, but I came to it in the wrong mindset. My jaw was set before the first page and within twenty I had given up.
A couple of thoughts on The Robber Bride so far:
1) Atwood’s writing is excellent. She has such a command of the language and a very strong structural sense in how she builds her story. It’s way too early to make such a sweeping statement about Atwood as a writer, but so far the aspect I’ve noticed most is her attention to detail. The Robber Bride is a mountain of details. Details relating to other details, with all of them going together to form a coherent world. But just having details isn’t enough. I’m not sure it was Neil Gaiman who commented on this before, but a well known author pointed out that if you cannot write description like Atwood, you best keep your descriptions brief. I get that comment now. Atwood’s strength is not just in her details but how she crafts and interconnects them. In some other book by another author I would be bored to tears by the amount of time paid to small details and description, but Atwood makes it sing. I think it’s this exact strength that allows her to get away with not following the age old adage of showing not telling. The Robber Bride is a book of telling. Constantly the reader is being told what people are feeling and thinking, as well as why they are feeling and thinking that way. It shouldn’t work. It should be deadly boring to read. But it’s not. Her characters are very specific and interesting, and I enjoy learning more about them, even if it’s not in watching them do things but reading about how they feel or think about a given situation. Isn’t there a truth to this? Character is action and decision and all of that, but how much of what we do is concrete action moving forward? Most lives are inner lives, the way we think and feel about what goes on around us that we’re not willing or able to act on. It’s part of the reason that even after two hundred pages of having virtually no forward momentum, I’m still with the story. Still interested. Still invested.
2) I’m hesitant to bring up this second point because I think it suggests something larger about how I approach writing that I’m not entirely comfortable with. The quickest way to the punch, though, is that reading The Robber Bride makes me feel that humans aren’t a very good idea. There is a great deal of sadness in the book, which is strange, because sadness is something I gravitate towards in my own writing and in other authors I really enjoy. Perhaps it connects with the first point about details. I was reading a character’s backstory last night and it put into my mind a passage from a Clive Barker novel, where two newly minted supreme beings are looking at each other and the one has to turn away because when he looks out with his new eyes he can see too much. Barker describes it as if the character can see every cell in horrible detail, as if it were a masterwork painting, and that it is simply too much. Perhaps I like my sadness in the vague. There is always an edge present throughout the novel, and again this might just be an aspect of this particular novel. Told as it is, about three women and their histories revolving around this one central destructive woman in their lives, it’s easy to see how the past, no matter how good at the time, still has a sense of the negative about it. It’s just everywhere. It’s not life-threatening. It’s not dangerous. It’s just…there. This negative sense. I don’t see any genuine caring between people. There’s analysis. A weighing of odds. Calculation and miscalculation born from sentiment. Why I’m hesitant about this point, why it makes me feel uncomfortable, is that I think this speaks more about me as a reader than it does Atwood as a writer. Do I prefer simpler stories? Clean narratives with happy endings? I’d like to think I can appreciate complexity, that I can deal with more reality in what I read. Surely not everything has to be life affirming, it can be life critical as well. Or can it? Do I simply not want to look? Does this impact my ability to write to a certain level? Not sure yet. Maybe that’ll come clear over the next few books.
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Kraken is the second novel by China Miéville I’ve finished but the third I’ve attempted. My first experience was The City & The City which is this very strange, very brilliant detective story that takes place in two cities that occupy the same space and starts with a body being found with no clue as to which of the co-existing cities it belongs to. I really enjoyed The City & The City. I loved Miéville’s take on architecture and the bueracracy that would be involved with such a strange situation. Cities and architecture are central to Miéville’s work. He puts a lot of effort into them and they stand as a central character in all the stories I’ve read. The second novel I attempted but did not finish was Perdido Street Station. Again there’s the city landscape, except this time more fantastical and steampunk. Maybe I started it at the wrong time. I’ve moved over to reading books on my Kindle since Perdido and maybe that helped me through Kraken, but I’m not sure that’s it. The connection that Kraken and The City & The City share is that they are worlds that are recognizable as our own with some additions. What works for City is that you can extrapolate your own experiences with cities onto it, both where you live and are familiar with and the strange ones you’ve visited and become lost in. And Kraken, well, you’ve been to this city before.
Kraken takes place in a London that’s very familiar, and it’s best to get this out of the way first because it was the most striking part of the novel at the beginning. The best way I can describe Kraken is that it’s a blending and refinement of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere and American Gods. I say refinement because, from where I stand, Kraken is the better novel, but it does owe a lot of Gaiman’s work. Which is a strange feeling to have when you’re reading a book. Gaiman’s novels didn’t come out so long ago. But while there’s clear echoes of characters and ideas in Miéville’s work, it never feels like something stolen. Borrowed, perhaps, but not stolen. A quick search online will show that I am not the first to think this either.
Let’s talk about the blending for a second. Kraken takes place in a London where mythological forces, cults and practitioners of various magics battle over who has the true account of the world. Everyone has an apocalypse and they can’t all be right. The police have their own semi-official magic squad who go out trying to stop the end of the world in a way that reminded me of Sergey Lukyanenko’s Night Watch (which, come to think of it, I should read/watch again sometime soon). Cults to the ocean. Londonmancers. A knacker (Miéville’s term for magic user) who uses complex mathematics to fold anything in on itself like origami. It’s all there. The key point is belief. Belief is power. It’s convincing the world to your argument, your point of view. Top it off with a disappearing giant squid from the British Museum of Natural History and a everyman tossed into a not so every world and we’re off to the races. So yeah. There’s bits of Gaiman in there, bit Miéville makes it his own. Easily.
Given the number of factions and characters at play in the world, it would have been equally easy for this novel to become too sprawling, a criticism I have of early Gaiman novels. Miéville’s strength in Kraken is making the large manageable. The descriptions and action is sparse and moves along at a fair clip. When he lingers, it’s usually on something beautiful, strange or ugly, something you’d slow and roll your window down for. Unlike Gaiman’s world, the London of Miéville doesn’t feel fantastical as much as it does odd, strange or weird. Extensions of how London is perceived already with knackered old geezers waging their crime wars against their adversaries and people going about their business. There’s a system to this London and if you push at it you get the sense that the world will hold, something I didn’t always feel when reading Neverwhere.
Out of his novels to date, those I’ve read and those I’ve heard about, I have to imagine Kraken is the most accessible if you want to give him a try. If you’ve read Gaiman and liked him, I think he’s definitely worth investigating. Not so much for the similarities but the differences as well. The comparisons to Gaiman are evident and it’s a common theme in the reviews I’ve seen (and written, as you can see) but writing it off as something less than it is would be unfortunate. Inspired or not, Kraken is a fun ride that’s well told in a world that is both interesting and believable, strange as it is.
Oh, and if anyone’s listening for the possible movie adaptation: Idris Elba for Dane. Lauren Socha for Collingswood. That is all.
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