Leave a Comment Book: The Robber Bride by Margaret Attwood
Krishna
After being fascinated by The Blind Assassin, I always wanted to read other books by Margaret Attwood and I am glad I picked up this one because it is a very satisfying story in many ways.
In reality, this is a simple story. Three women who were cheated by a deceitful, boyfriend stealing, lying and confidence trickster of a girl (Zenia) come together in friendship. But where the book elevates itself to the stratosphere is in the telling. What a gift Margaret has in her narrative powers! It is fascinating, and drags you in slowly. Each girl has a quirk/ trait and also a whole set of endearing vulnerabilities. Tony is interested in history, fascinated by details, has the power to think all names backwards. Nice. Charis believes in all airy fairy stuff, supernatural beliefs, excessive worry about everything and so on. Roz is a businesswoman who is rich but is very motherly.
First, we come to Zenia and Toni. Zenia’s story about herself changes all the time. Tony is a lecturer in a university where she studied but has a boyfriend called West whom she bubble wraps and keeps from any calamity because he is fragile.
When they see the ‘dead’ Zenia in flesh in the restaurant (in Toronto’s Queen Street, no less, past Queen Mother’s Cafe) they get shocked and confused.
Charis seems to be a very cute person believing in auras and magnetic interference, afraid to talk about war since it “invites” trouble. Roz is a caring person but Toni is the practical one who knows historical facts.
Roz believes in supernatural but is very rich. Mitch gets infatuated with Zenia and leaves her but she has an elder son who is sober and twins who are forever mischievous.
Roz is the CEO of a company and has a gay assistant who adores her as a boss and she adores him as an excellent help.
It is lovely how the story goes from the one moment backwards. It is like watching a movie camera focus on a tiny thing and then move “backwards” encompassing more and more in your field of vision. The story starts with the dynamite moment when the three girls discover that Zenia, far from dead, was present in the restaurant where they met for dinner. Then it goes back and tells you what they were doing immediately preceding that moment with tantalizing hints of the destruction Zenia wrought in their lives. Then they tell you how Zenia came into their lives. Nice.
As it happens, in the hostel where a nineteen year Toni was living, there was also Roz, one of the girls in the Common Room with whom ‘Toni had nothing in common’ as with all other girls there, and Charis was also there, vapid and where Toni did not even talk to her. One day, in the night, when Toni thought Charis was sleepwalking, she follows her to protect her and realizes that she was not asleep at all and gets too annoyed.
Tony reminisces about how Zenia befriended her, learnt all her secrets in that ‘long ago’ time. Zenia shocks Tony by admitting she was prostituted when she was as young as five by her mom for money. When her mom got TB, Zenia ran away but by then she was 16. She and West live together and Tony lives alone in her apartment but Zenia worms her way into her confidence easily. Tony talks about her own runaway mother who abandoned her and her father who killed himself in their own living room when she was away.
Finally Zenia borrows a large sum through blackmail and disappears. Tony discovers that she has taken large amounts of money from West claiming it is for Tony as well.
One day simply Zenia shows up at her doorstep (by now she has moved her residence and West has married her) and simply walks away with West. When she flees again leaving West devastated, he comes crawling back to Tony and she takes him back in. You want to scream in frustration.
Meanwhile Charis catches Zenia in an affair with the adult son of Roz.
Charis reminisces her old story as you slowly get absorbed in her life. She met Billy when he was handed to her as a protective place for dodge dodgers. She lets him into her bed slowly and becomes obsessed with him. Zenia comes into her yoga studio battered and bruised, and then into her apartment for refuge.
So beautifully told on how Zenia poisons the relationship between Charis (or Karen as she used to be called) and Miles is breathtaking. So is the childhood of Charis where she had to live with a very moody mother who did not ‘spare the rod’. The way Margaret Attwood describes this from Karen’s point of view makes your heart ache. This is why she is so famous. It gets worse. When Zenia comes into her life, bruised and battered she takes her in only to find that she lied about her ancestry (Romanian and grandmother tortured to death) about her having a cancer and being operated on and pretty much everything. When Charis discovers she is pregnant, both her boyfriend and Zenia leave, and she finds all her chickens slaughtered. Toni and Roz come to help her recover.
Roz found Mitch and we know that he is a user. But she does not. This is what is special about Margaret. Telling you things that the character does not seem to notice, though it is the character’s reminiscence. Mitch is a serial adulterer and she seems to put up with it all her life. Until Zenia walks in. Roz is rich and owns a medium sized business and she has everything she needs in life. Mitch gave her three kids. The elder, reserved one called Adrian and younger twin girls.
Roz married Mitch when he woos her in her office and marries her (even refusing sex offered by her). We see it as a ploy to get at her money but Roz seems to be blind, and marries him against the advice of her parents. We go back a bit further and see that her dad was really a smuggler who made good in the war and returned with the loot and he is ‘an immigrant’ who married well and settled down, rich. Also that he met Roz’s mother when he was wounded in a brawl and she rescued him – even then she was running a boarding house. Now you get another story from Zenia : how she had Jewish roots in Germany and her parents were taken away by the Nazis and how her aunt who is not a Jew saved her and brought her up. And how her entire family – parents, brother and sister, perished and she alone survived.
Even after Roz mentions both Tony and Charis, Zenia manages to convince her of her sincerity and appeals to her mothering instincts as a homeless waif buffeted by the cruel vicissitudes of life; of course Roz takes her into her protection. Everyone has badly misjudged Zenia! Zenia really opened up only to her with her true life story. You see a train wreck coming loud and clear, as Margaret Attwood so beautifully wants you to.
When Mitch goes with Zenia and even tells Roz he loves them both, she is shocked. When Zenia dumps him and goes to London, he follows! When Mitch comes back defeated, and wants to just slide back into the house, Roz does what I thought was the only sensible thing she has done in that entire book, which is to refuse to let him in, especially since he seems to only want to come back to the house and not to her and is only back because he failed to find Zenia in England. But he dies (in a staged accident to spare the children’s feelings) and she goes to piece all over again and pines for the early days when he cheated continuously and she tolerated it continuously.
So meeting Zenia, whose coffin they had seen and whose funeral they had attended, in flesh unsettles them deeply.
After the meeting, Tony waits to kill Zenia and tracks her down resolutely to the hotel lobby. As Zenia tries to spin a new web of charm, Tony is on her guard and is shocked when Zenia transforms into a monster the split second after Tony refuses her request to take her in once again.
My complaint at this point is that the story turns formulaic. As if programmed, Zenia tries to lure every one of them in turns into her web and each one resists, sensibly. (Or even in a common sense way, as every one of them knows what type of person Zenia is). It gets a bit tiring. Zenia is unerringly cruel to all of them. She says Tony was a terrible lay for West, Karen was horrible in Miles’ opinion and he is the one who killed her chickens. To Roz she says she has been bedding her son and that he is into drugs. Asks for five thousand dollars not to lead police on to the son.
Then the story goes into an abrupt end in the main stream and a whole bunch of aftermaths later. Nicely written, definitely hugely enjoyable.
7/ 10
– – Krishna (Feb 2019)