Krishna
I am (relatively) new to this author’s books. I first read The Blind Assassin and was hooked. Then (by pure chance and in no particular order) I tried The Robber Bride and found is excellent too. In my eyes she could do no wrong and Alias Grace sealed the deal and I was in awe of her style.
Now, I still like those books; they are indeed excellent. My next book The Handmaid’s Tale, had some odd bits but by the end I liked that too. More than the story, it is the style of storytelling that kept me coming back for more. Finally, this book showed me that like all other great authors, Margaret can also produce books that are very far from her best books.
This is weird and even the title comes up near the end of the book in a surreal scene. I do not even know what it is a metaphor for.
Now, for the story.
Ainsley works as a tester of defective electric toothbrushes. Hates discussion of teeth by dentists. She is a roommate of the narrator Miss Marian MacAlpin. She works in an office on questionnaires.
Her friend Clara has just had a baby and her elder son Arthur is also a small boy. The story takes off when she goes interviewing (survey regarding a beer commercial) and meets a very weird man in his apartment.
She is friends with benefits with Peter and he seems to be in serious relationships and breakups while getting Marian to have sex with him in various places. Weird for a Margaret Attwood story indeed. It gets weirder. She runs away when she goes with Peter to meet her old friend Len and then hides under the sofa. I don’t even understand and at this point in time I am thinking two things : This is Margaret Attwood’s first ever book and she did not have the famed story weaving skills she later demonstrated in The Blind Assassin, Robber Bride etc. Or, maybe it is fully woven and she is deliberately feeding you piece by piece to keep you hooked, again like the stories in those two other books!
The story wanders. Marianne is proposed to by Peter and Ainsley plots to seduce Len, Marian’s friend, in a very calculated way so that she could get pregnant.
Marian meets the strange boy again in the laundromat and has more weird conversations with him. You can see the direction the story is taking but still it feels totally weird.
She is not very happy with Peter and bumps into the weird boy in a movie theater. She goes there alone to give space to Ainsley so that Len can ‘accidentally’ seduce her on a visit to her house. She is successful, in case you were curious.
At this point, very unusually for an Attwood novel, you feel totally disengaged with the characters. Now Marian meets the guy Duncan at the movie theater, goes to his house, cancelling a dinner engagement with her fiance to give him clothes to iron, listens to his totally weird concepts that would put even an ardent admirer off – never mind an acquaintance, and lets him seduce her. Makes absolutely no sense, even assuming her ambivalence with her current fiance.
She goes through life with weird feelings where she grows an aversion to meat. Now, I think this is the story of Marian growing apart from Peter and closer to Duncan but because of the total weirdness of the whole thing, this reads strange and definitely you don’t get involved with the characters as much in this one.
In addition, part I where Marian narrates the story and Part II where she comes in the story in third person, look like they were written by different people. I do not mean deliberately (which she does in The Robber Bride for example in a brilliant way) but in quality of writing. The second part feels more like the Attwood we know in the writing style but still lacking in the weight of the story.
And totally ridiculously, Marian starts developing aversion to one food after the other, does not like to be with Peter, goes after Duncan who is the weirdest person and does not care two hoots for anyone including Marian. The side story of Ainsley who first seduces Marian’s friend Lee while making him believe that he seduced her and how she did not want him after he helped her get pregnant but later discovered that the child needed a ‘father figure’ and so went after him are all – again uncharacteristically for this author – rather illogical and irritating.
And the ending? Equally bad. If you want to read Attwood, this is not the book you want to start with. In fact you can give it a miss completely.
2/10
– – Krishna