Margaret Atwood writes badly. Look at the mismanaged simile from The Handmaid’s Tale in my title. Two things are compared – in a way that emphasises their dissimilarity. Why is a woman like a piece of toast? In this case, because both are buttered: Offred, the handmaid, is improvising a moisturiser. Otherwise, there is no comparison. As written, though, flatness, not butter, is apparently the point of similitude. Had Atwood written, ‘Buttered like a piece of toast, I lie flat on my single bed’, the problem would not have arisen. The sentence would merely be banal. But she didn’t. The prose is barely competent.

Is this perhaps a deliberate strategy? Sometimes, of course, a novelist has good reason for writing ‘badly’. Listen to the intricate clumsiness of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer apologising to Aunt Polly: ‘I know now it was mean, but I didn’t mean to be mean’. It is so vividly vernacular, so precisely vernacular, that Salinger copies it in The Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield is musing on why his teacher, old Mr Spencer, gets a bang from a beat-up Navajo blanket: ‘I know that sounds mean to say, but I don’t mean it mean. I just mean…’

Superficially, Margaret Atwood may appear to have good reasons for writing badly, but actually she cannot write any better. This is my argument.

The ‘good’ reasons? All her novels have alibis, cover stories, get-out clauses. The incompetent narrators of her novels are her aliases. Any blame is always designed to fall on them instead of Margaret Atwood. The incompetence is most obvious in the immediate verbal texture of Atwood’s novels – in description and dialogue – but extends beyond the words into plot, characterisation, and everything else we expect a novelist to be able to do. Particularly a novelist of international-prize-winning stature like Margaret Atwood.

The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Cat’s Eye (1988), Alias Grace (1996), and Oryx and Crake (2003) were all short-listed for the Booker Prize, and The Blind Assassin won in 2000. In fact the only writer to have been nominated more times than Margaret Atwood is Iris Murdoch – another over-prized prize clunker. In 2005 Atwood was also nominated for the Man Booker International Prize, for outstanding achievement in fiction, and won the Edinburgh Book Festival Enlightenment Award for her contribution to world literature and thought.

Atwood is the author of eleven novels and a novella, The Penelopiad (2005), also published recently in a play version. Additionally she has written many collections of short stories and poems. My discussion of her full-length fiction and one of the stories (‘Giving Birth’) will skip about chronologically, so it may be useful to supply a bibliography here:

The Edible Woman (1969)

Surfacing (1972)

Lady Oracle (1976)

‘Giving Birth,’ in Dancing Girls (1977)

Life Before Man (1979)

Bodily Harm (1981)

The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)

Cat’s Eye (1988)

The Robber Bride (1993)

Alias Grace (1996)

The Blind Assassin (2000)

Oryx and Crake (2003)

The Penelopiad (2005)

An Atwood novel is normally narrated by a woman, and in some cases this woman is a professional writer who hides behind an alias. She is never any good, however. Sometimes her lover is a writer too, and he is never any good either. In other words, Atwood aims low. I am going to start with examples from Atwood’s tenth novel, the Booker Prize-winner The Blind Assassin (2000). I begin here because the novel was highly acclaimed and is a work of Atwood’s maturity – and yet it is also a classic example of an Atwoodian alibi for incompetence: blame the writer-narrator.

Blame The Narrator – Part I

Iris Chase, the elderly narrator of The Blind Assassin (2000), once published a cult novel, also called The Blind Assassin (1947), under the name of her dead sister Laura. In this story the heroine’s lover, a pulp-writer, whispers sweet sci-fi in her ear – the doings on planet Zycron – during their sexual assignations. Later he writes some of the story up in a debased version to make money. The Zycron narrative forms a story-within-the-story in the original 1947 Blind Assassin. In the present tense of Atwood’s 2000 novel, Iris narrates her memoirs, and details her constricted everyday life.  

Iris is not much of a writer, as she freely admits. She can’t describe her own husband of many years’ standing: ‘I’ve failed to convey Richard, in any rounded sense. He remains a cardboard cutout. I know that. I can’t truly describe him, I can’t get a precise focus: he’s blurred’ [585]. When she wrote The Blind Assassin (1947), she didn’t even consider herself to be ‘writing – just writing down’ [626]. Nowadays her idea of a symbol for love is this: ‘Not a simple gift, pure gold and shining; instead, something ancient and possibly baneful, like an iron charm rusting among old bones. A talisman of sorts, this love, but a heavy one; a heavy thing for me to carry around with me, slung on its iron chain around my neck’ [126]. As well as dropping this symbol on the readers’s hippocampus, she interprets her parents’ engagement on an ice rink: ‘so blank, so innocent, so solid to all appearances, but thin ice all the same’ [86]. At a late stage it is pointed out to us that any bad style is focalised for Iris: ‘You’ll notice how easily I slip into inflated language like shape our destinies, once I wander off in this direction. But never mind’ [535].

So: the shortcomings are deliberate. But if they are skilfully intended, there also has to be an intended compensation or effect. Otherwise, calling the errors deliberate is merely an excuse. In the Mark Twain example cited above, for example, the pay-off for the repetition is accuracy. Tom is unintentionally funny, but Mark Twain is intentionally so.

Alternatively, it might be that the pay-off for apparently bad writing is authentication of period setting. In Ian McEwan’s Atonement, for instance, things are occasionally ‘dastardly’ or contemplated ‘deliciously’ because this is the 1930s, the style focalised for the tyro writer Briony Tallis. The ungainly relative pronoun clauses are also deliberate – ‘in the service of which the exclamation mark was indispensable’ [my italics]. The critic William Sutcliffe failed to recognise this deliberate syntactical stiffness when he complained, in a review of Atonement in The Independent on Sunday, that ‘we’re being invited to read a bad novel’. In fact, McEwan’s prose is a sophisticated hybrid – both 1930s and subtly set with McEwan brilliants – whose narrative weighting shifts unobtrusively, if not undetectably.

It is difficult, however, to see what the pay-offs are of Margaret Atwood’s bad metaphors and clichés, or where the advantages of cardboard-cutout characterisation lie – unless we are lazy readers who prefer to keep things stereotypically simple and familiar. John Updike, who praised The Blind Assassin highly, observed nonetheless that some of the characters ‘have a faint dusty savour of the stockroom’. He did not say, for instance, that he was glad of the stereotypes because they enabled him to understand their creator, Iris, much better. He did not say they are skilfully styled to suit Iris’s view of the world. And it cannot be that the bad writing in The Blind Assassin is historically authenticating because, as Updike also noted in passing, Atwood does not, in fact, get things right: the obscenities contained in Iris’s novel, for instance, are implausible for the assigned date of publication in 1947.

Is Margaret Atwood, then, summoning all her powers to authenticate the voice of a bad novelist – or is she herself a bad novelist? If The Blind Assassin were a lone example among Atwood’s novels, the former view would be plausible. The evidence of the other novels, however, to which we now turn, demonstrates that shifting the blame is endemic in Atwood. Using a bad novelist is her alibi – or one of them – for writing badly. It’s like trying to hide behind an alias. (Not me! It was that ‘Iris’.) A step on from using a nom de plume – as Atwood’s writer-characters tend to.

And if we compare Atwood, not to her characters but to other writers, the anorexia of the excuse becomes even more apparent. Generally, when we are told that a narrator is not very accomplished, we are not actually made to suffer as readers, because the writer supplies whatever the narrator lacks. For example, Joseph Conrad’s language-teacher narrator in Under Western Eyes declares ‘I have no talent’ (for fiction, that is) only as a guarantee of accuracy and authenticty. This does not mean, however, that Under Western Eyes actually reads like a work of no talent.

Blame The Future, Blame TV

After The Blind Assassin, Atwood wrote Oryx and Crake (2003). If Atwood was a brilliant writer who had suppressed her verbal powers in order to create the lesser writer Iris, one might expect her to unleash these powers again in her new novel. Notoriously, for instance, when Dickens had to suppress himself to write the prosaic narrative voice of Esther Summerson in Bleak House, he couldn’t help some indecorous flashes of genius. When the dandy Mr Turveydrop bows to Esther, she reports ‘I almost believe I saw creases come into the whites of his eyes’. But this is too fanciful for Esther’s voice.

We might expect Oryx and Crake to be good for an external reason as well: it was, after all, short-listed for the Booker Prize.

A futuristic novel, Oryx and Crake tells the story of Jimmy alias Snowman, supposedly the last survivor of human civilisation. Like Iris, he is another bad writer narrating his past life and describing his present miseries. Specifically he explains how civilisation collapsed in a period when genetic engineering was rife: herpes simplex came with a useful neon stripe and a new race of human beings were designed to breed once every three years when the women’s bums turned blue. Now he lives in fear of the genetically spliced animals, pigoons and wolvogs, which dominate the earth.

As a boy, young Jimmy learned that big corporations did not simply discover diseases, but created them, in order to enlarge the market for cures:

‘That would be really evil,’ said Jimmy.

‘That’s what my father thought,’ said Crake.

‘He knew?’ Jimmy really was paying attention now.

‘He found out. That’s how come they pushed him off a bridge.’ [248]

This is TV mini-series standard. Indeed, a few pages later, we read: ‘It was like watching some corny old spy DVD, James Bond or something’ [252]. Why? Just in case we should have mistakenly thought that Margaret Atwood is writing junk herself, this tells us that she is really a sophisticated postmodernist. She is writing ‘junk’ self-consciously. If the dialogue seems like bad TV or to belong in a poorly imagined movie, that is not because Atwood has been terminally influenced herself. And it’s not because it’s parody. No, it’s because people in this future world are highly numerate but not very literate. Numeracy is what’s rewarded. Intelligent women scientists, for instance, talk like shower-ad babes. And listen to how parents row. Mom first:

‘You used to be so… you had ideals, then.’

‘Sure,’ said Jimmy’s father in a tired voice. ‘I’ve still got them. I just can’t afford them.’ [64]

It’s more bad TV, and Atwood has her alibis for writing it. It’s not her, it’s the future. It’s the artifice of capitalist society. It’s human nature in a hothouse.

It’s how people will talk if the world happens to turn into a show with boffins and bad script writers.

The plausibility of a writer’s depiction of the future depends on their perceptiveness about human nature and society in the present. Then they can speculate on the directions these might conceivably take. So how reliable is Atwood as a guide to the present? Or the recent past? This is Atwood, in interview, on life in 1994: ‘the role definition that we have made up for adults is that they have to be very serious and boring all the time… Especially men, they think they have to be really serious all the time’ [Waltzing Again, 185].

*  *  *  *  *

However. If dialogue and symbolism and men are a writer’s weaknesses, mightn’t she compensate with mastery of plot?

Oryx and Crake cannot tell us. The blame for the incompetence of its main plot is also foisted on James Bond and his ilk. The genetic scientist Crake (formerly Glenn) masterminds the destruction of the human race as we know it. ‘It was melodrama so overdone that he and Crake would have laughed their heads off at it, if they’d been fourteen and watching it on DVD’ [382]. Again, Margaret Atwood thinks that merely saying ‘I know this looks like rubbish’ means that it’s no longer rubbish – which is about as effective as putting inverted commas around a bad smell. (Remember The Blind Assassin? ‘He remains a cardboard cutout. I know that.’ [my italics]) The narrative laziness is astonishing. So are the two pages which suggest possible motivations for Crake’s behaviour immediately prior to his death, and then decide on none of them – so that Atwood is not obliged to give a plausible coherent account. (Compare the perfunctory dystopia of The Handmaid’s Tale – whose perfunctoriness, whose lack of rationale, is explained away by 6ffred’s drug-induced partial amnesia.) Instead, here, we are recommended to consult his fridge magnets for an explanation. ‘You could tell a lot about a person from their fridge magnets’ [404].

Let’s be clear: the observation that people sometimes behave like TV is not the problem here. The screen is indisputably a major role model, especially in emotional crises, which most people are unused to managing but which are routine in soap operas and the movies. That’s why, when an adulterous couple break up in Atwood’s Life Before Man (1979), there’s ‘a lot of afternoon soap stuff from both of them, including It’s better this way’ [23]. The stereotype is accurate. The problem, however, is when this observation substantially dictates the language, plot and characterisation of your own novel, when it becomes an alibi for attempting nothing better – which feels especially ironic in a novel about the projected illiteracy of the future.

(The quality of the writing might be easier to conceal in a first-person narrative, where we are more inclined to accept shortcomings as character voice, particularly if they have the argument of novelty. An extreme example: we can read Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (2006), narrated uniquely in first-person text-ing slang, without the faintest idea whether Malkani can write a sentence. Maybe he’s not letting on about his prose talents: I’m waiting for his second novel to find out. But Oryx and Crake is, unusually for an Atwood novel, fatally in fact, written in the third person throughout, where it’s harder to hide.)

Atwood’s main character in Oryx and Crake, Jimmy alias Snowman, is a professional ad-man who wrote his undergraduate thesis on the armpit of twentieth-century writing: the self-help book. He is the cover for the rest of the bad writing. ‘Jimmy felt a chill up his spine. “Who knows that you know?”’ [248]. Presumably we are to attribute this clunker to him, not to Margaret Atwood. (The spine-chilling cliché is unimproved by the substitution of up for the usual down.) Presumably it is also Jimmy who observes a ‘sense of the forbidden, of a door swinging open that ought to be kept locked, of a stream of secret lives, running underground, in the darkness just below his feet’ [254]. This is embarrassingly un-eerie. And, unsurprisingly, Jimmy alias Snowman has a cover story much like Margaret Atwood’s. It’s not him who’s talking or writing badly, it’s them – the voices he hears, which range stylistically from bogus guru to stand-up comic to first-grade teacher. ‘He must have heard that somewhere. Surely his own mind would never have come up with pointless repinings, not all by itself’ [51].

But, as the (mad) heroine of Atwood’s early novel, Surfacing (1972) observes, ‘If you look like them and talk like them and think like them then you are them, I was saying, you speak their language, a language is everything you do’ [123]. Certainly language is everything when you are writing. The verbal texture is everything you do – it is how you deliver all that a novel requires – including, obviously, the non-linguistic reactions of the reader.

Not every single word of Oryx and Crake is bad. Like other long Atwood novels, it hits on something good eventually, if only, it seems, by misadventure. There is, for instance, a moment of penetration into human behaviour such as we might expect from a novelist: the observation that Jimmy’s father and Ramona can’t have been having an affair early on. ‘Otherwise they wouldn’t have done so much earnest, blameless gazing at each other in André’s Bistro at OrganInc’ [75].

Occasional good moments are not, however, enough to sustain a novel. Their effect here is like chocolate chips in a cowpat: you still wouldn’t want to eat it. I adapt this simile from The Blind Assassin: Iris says the local cookies are the size of cowpats. Oryx and Crake has, more problematically, the taste of one.

But maybe a novelist should not be judged on her eleventh novel. How many writers come up with something really good the eleventh time, or even the tenth? Charles Dickens’ eleventh achievement was Hard Times. Henry James’s was The Tragic Muse. George Eliot stopped at seven.  

I Blame My Neurosis 

Atwood’s first novel, The Edible Woman (1969), published coincidentally the first year the Booker Prize was awarded, is an enormous improvement on her last one. She tried, however, belatedly, to give it an alibi too. ‘Its more self-indulgent grotesqueries are perhaps attributable to the youth of the author, though I would prefer to think that they derive instead from the society by which she found herself surrounded’ [7]. (Don’t blame the author. It was that ‘Canada’.)  

This novel is more than capable of explaining itself, however. It tells the story of Marian, who gets engaged, feels as if her brain has been scooped out like a melon, and finds that she can no longer manage the first person narrative – or most foods. She suffers the ‘violence’ of her fiancé Peter taking her by the arm after she’s behaved ridiculously [79]. These inverted commas are mine – but the novel also puts them constantly, implicitly, around the heroine’s hysterical overreactions to her experiences. It is always indicating to us ‘I know this is silly, but…’ Quite often, it is Marian herself who is saying it. When Peter wants to take a picture of her at their engagement party, she is ‘unreasonably anxious’ and freezes. ‘ “What’s the matter with me?” she said to herself. It’s only a camera’ [231-2]. Unlike the implicit inverted commas of Oryx and Crake, however, these are not asking us to excuse bad writing and poor plotting, but asking us to excuse something a genuinely competent novel can accommodate: eccentric psychology.

Instead of excusing itself, this novel is amusing about how its characters excuse themselves. Typically they blame bizarre behaviour on neuroses. (Don’t blame me. It’s my penis envy.) Marian takes a lover, the postgraduate loon Duncan, who prefers to be maladjusted. His symptoms include binge ironing. Lost in the theoretical mazes of his own bogus academic writing, he says that with ‘ironing – well, you can straighten things out and get them flat. God knows it isn’t because I’m neat and tidy’ [142]. He needs piles of ironing like a junkie needs drugs. ‘Got the stuff?’ he asks when Marian arrives with two clean blouses, a pillowcase and a few guest towels [136]. Fraudulently, wittily, he also self-diagnoses sexual problems. Latent homosexuality, maybe? ‘He considered that for a moment. “Or maybe I’m a latent heterosexual. Anyway I’m pretty latent”’ [190].

Duncan is a minor character illustrative of a major trend in early Atwood: theories are convenient alibis for inaction, misbehaviour, and evasion of the truth. In Atwood’s second novel Surfacing (1972), the husband of another minor character preaches that monogamy is politically wrong – ‘jealousy is bourgeois, it’s a leftover from the property ethic, he thinks we should all be swingers and share it around’ – but the truth is, ‘it’s just to show me he can do it and get away with it, I can’t stop him; all that theorizing about it is coverup bullshit garbage’ [93].

Surfacing is centrally about covering up the truth, about getting one’s alibi together: ‘I run quickly over my version of it, my life, checking it like an alibi’, says the heroine-narrator, ‘it fits; it’s all there till the time I left’ [67]. The story of her life centres on the suppressed guilt she feels after an abortion, and her invention of alternative, fantasy disasters to avoid remembering that the abortion even occurred. As a result she is deeply, in fact, insanely unreliable as a narrator, and her constant lying to the reader becomes irritating. First she seeks maximum sympathy by claiming that her husband treated her like an invalid at their wedding, then ‘imposed’ pregnancy on her and the attendant horrors of a hospital birth instead of the natural birth she advocates elsewhere [28]. Later she changes her story entirely: it was an abortion not a wedding because the father was a married man. (So doctors were required. Natural birth wasn’t an issue.)

The heroine shifts the blame, however, from her own words onto the inadequacy or failure of language itself. Things would be better, for instance, if there were no word for neck. (She herself is given no name.) Even at the very end of the story, when she acknowledges that she must stop preferring to be a victim – ‘I have to recant, give up the old belief that I am powerless and because of it nothing [I do] will ever hurt anyone’ [185] – the human need for language remains highly suspect. ‘For us it’s necessary, the intercession of words; and we will probably fail, sooner or later, more or less painfully’ [186].

Unfortunately but not uncommonly for a writer, Margaret Atwood agrees with her heroine about the unhappy incompetence of language as a communication tool. Surfacing shrouds this notion protectively in its own linguistic mystery. Here is a suspected pregnancy: ‘But I bring with me from the distant past five nights ago the time-traveller, the primaeval one… It might be the first one, the first true human; it must be born, allowed’ [185]. In what sense, the first? In this sense: the grand plan is to teach the child no words. A crazy, damaging plan, then, but one that is treated reverentially here. The heroine’s self-pitying evasion of responsibility for the unhappiness of her life, potentially an excellent subject, is instead aided and abetted by the pseudo-profundity of the writing.

Blame Language

Dissatisfaction with words, especially those conventionally used to describe reproduction, is frequent in Atwood – and an alibi for the failure to find any better ones, or even to develop an adequate respect for the usefulness of those we have. Atwood’s 1977 story ‘Giving Birth’ begins:

But who gives it? And to whom is it given? Certainly it doesn’t feel like giving, which implies a flow, a gentle handing over, no coercion. But there is scant gentleness here… [Dancing Girls, 225; my italics]

Who says ‘giving’ is ‘gentle’? How about: she gives him a slap on the cheek? Because he gave her the finger. Scant gentleness here either. This narrator says she will not be the one to re-name giving birth. No surprise there – Atwood’s heroines commonly pick up phrases they find unsatisfactory but, like shells on the beach, do little with them. Twenty years later, in Alias Grace (1996), ‘lost baby’ is the wrong term for miscarriage because it implies the possibility of finding [106]. And ‘what they call a delicate condition’ isn’t delicate. ‘They also call it an unhappy condition, and that is closer to the truth’ [107]. Scores of similar, reflexively pedantic examples could be cited.

Apparently, there are no words to describe what is going to happen in ‘Giving Birth’. ‘The word in English for unwanted intercourse is rape. But there is no word in the language for what is about to happen to this woman’ [230]. There are two women in this story: Jeanie, a woman going in labour, and an imaginary pregnant woman whom she has ‘seen’ following her around for some time. There are supposed to be no words for either woman’s experience. What is this ‘indescribable’ bodily event which the brain can’t find the language to express? In Jeanie’s case, it is giving birth after many hours of pain and (luckily for a first time) three pushes. The words the narrator is groping for must be, then, an easy time of it. But what this story particularly observes, Atwood explained in interview, is ‘there is no word for forced pregnancy in the language. We don’t have that concept, although the fact itself exists’ [Waltzing Again, 80]. ‘Forced pregnancy’ means that it has been imposed on Jeanie – by herself, the person she was nine months ago, who is not exactly the person who is actually going to ‘give birth’ (whatever that means, of course). How useful would it be to be able say it in one word, rather than two? And how is this outrage tantamount to rape?

It isn’t. These fictions demonstrate the failure, not of language, but of its professional user Margaret Atwood. Allegedly they are concerned with the parts of women’s experiences that other writers don’t have the language to reach. Really they substitute chimerical problems for real ones, and thus shift blame and attention away from Atwood’s inadequate, incompetent representation of real problems. Consider, for instance, how well she handles her major preoccupation with human reproduction.

Back To Blaming The Future

A startling fact. For a writer so fixated on fantasising how human reproduction might happen as horribly as possible – famously, in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Offred is reduced to a breeder – she pays little attention to the way birth does happen, horribly or not.

Here is an abortion in Alias Grace (1996): ‘Mary went with him [the doctor] out of the room, her face as white as a sheet; and then I heard screams, and crying, and after a time the doctor pushed her in through the scullery door’ [175]. Nothing is seen, nothing shown. In Life Before Man (1979), it’s the father witnessing a birth who sees nothing on our behalf: ‘When he’d finally been allowed in, the event was over. There was a baby where no baby had been’ [156].

In fact, Atwood’s major contribution to the description of birth is that it’s a bit like how a kitten comes out.

In Surfacing, the mumbo-jumbo birth plan is for the baby (again a first one) to ‘slip out easily as… a kitten’, with the heroine licking it clean and then biting the umbilical cord off with her teeth [156]. In ‘Giving Birth’, the old kitten suggestion slips out again: ‘a wet kitten slithers between her legs’. And again, in The Blind Assassin: ‘It slipped out just like a kitten’ when the heroine’s mother miscarries [113]. This time, we do see the foetus, but improbably, through the eyes of the two young sisters, after it’s left lying handily on the hallway floor in an enamel basin. In The Handmaid’s Tale, kittens are in the air yet again: ‘the room smells … of the plaid blanket on the bed when the cat gave birth on it, once, before she was spayed’ [133]. Once – and forever more in Margaret Atwood.

This inability to write well (or even unrepetitively) about recognisable experiences accounts for Atwood’s decision to write about unrecognisable ones. The evidence shows that she expends enormous effort thinking up incredible sexual reproduction scenarios – like the life of a futuristic handmaid – and very little on the real thing. This is because fantasy can disguise a writer’s failure to make reality interesting (an overriding problem, as we will see, in Atwood’s middle novels). Or to make it persuasive. Perhaps the green, genetically-engineered rabbits of the future will look ‘almost translucent, like a piece of Turkish delight’, as they do in Oryx and Crake [110]. Or not.

Atwood can be authoritative about what no one else has ever seen – just as the originator of a nonce word can hardly be challenged on how she defines it. (Compare the faux-naïve comment of the ancient Syrian writer Lucian, in The True History: ‘Well, that is what it was like on the Moon. If you do not believe me, go and see for yourself’.)

And this gives the lie to her repeated claim to be representing the life of the average intelligent woman.

On the contrary, Atwood is an inventor of niche crises. Less a maker of novels, than of useless novelties, of labour-wasting gadgets that alert us to non-existent problems. She could have been an excellent copywriter for the Kleen-eze catalogue. Indeed, she once joked that if she hadn’t become a novelist, she’d have been growing her own glow-in-the-dark potatoes by now. Another feature which all those nocturnal gardeners among us will soon hardly believe we lived without…

Blame The Narrator  – Part II

But we have leapt very far into the future now. Let’s get back to where we were. After Surfacing (1972), in which the heroine’s excuses about language blurred into her creator’s, Atwood wrote Lady Oracle (1976), a novel about a writer.

Joan Foster, a.k.a. Louise or Louisa K. Delacourt, has faked her own death and is now narrating the story of her life to explain how she arrived in this situation: her unhappily fat childhood, her irregular marriage, her eccentric affairs. Named Joan after the alias of actress Joan Crawford (née Lucille Fay LeSueur) – although this story may be a ‘cover up’ [336]) – Joan Foster uses her Delacourt alias to write historical romance. She keeps this a secret even, or especially, from the men in her life.

Joan is not a very good writer. Why not? At the beginning of this essay I said writers sometimes have good reason for writing badly. What, then, is Margaret Atwood’s declared reason for using bad writer-narrators?

‘Why did George Eliot not write about a successful female writer?’ Atwood countered in a 1976 interview. ‘Why did she kill off Maggie Tulliver and marry off Dorothea? Perhaps Eliot was attempting to portray the fate of the average woman in her society – the average intelligent woman with no options. You could ask the same question of me. Why am I not writing about a successful female writer? Which is what I am’ [my italics] [Waltzing Again, 23]. ‘Successful’ evidently means good, not just commercial, because the heroine of Lady Oracle is certainly commercial. ‘What’s it like to be a successful bad writer?’ she’s asked at a party [239]. Atwood, already loudly confident that she is a successfully good writer herself, bashfully comparing herself to George Eliot, claims she doesn’t write about the successful because she wants to portray the fate of the average woman – but then does so in novels imagining them with the most un-average fates.

There is another contradiction: Atwood’s male writers are mediocre or worse. Joan starts writing after she meets her first lover, a Polish count who writes hack ‘nurse novels’ under the alias Mavis Quilp. He’s also written a serious but commercially unviable epic novel which is, naturally, never quoted. (Again, the future looms: in The Blind Assassin, the heroine’s lover, a sci-fi pulp writer, will consider that he could write serious fiction if didn’t have to churn them out. Fair enough: he can’t afford to starve. But Margaret Atwood can afford to write. So why not aim high? Why not treat us to extracts from his commercially unviable, but brilliant, realist novel instead? Because you’d have to be able to write them. Also because you’d be opening yourself to judgment of how brilliant, how masterly you really were.) Obviously, it’s easier and less incriminatory to write ‘trash’ in inverted commas – which Atwood has been doing with gusto ever since she invented examples of windswept writing from the rubbishy Delacourt romances. Although at least this ‘trash’ is so very bad it becomes enjoyably bad. It is, in other words, gleefully parodic, happily incompetent.

Lady Oracle (1976) is pleasurable, verbally as well as psychologically. In fact it’s Atwood’s best novel. Here’s a handful of chocolate chips (to add to the one I found in Oryx and Crake): ‘finished and costumed girls’ about to perform a ballet show for their parents stand against the wall ‘inert as temple sacrifices’ so as not to damage themselves [47]. A small man darts around the enormously fat heroine, ‘like a tugboat around the Queen Elizabeth’, his romantic attentions absurd: ‘it was like being pursued by Charlie Chaplin’ [100-1]. The boyfriend of another fatty ‘watched her as if she were a gorgeous sunset’, while she ‘applied’ a hat to herself [104-5]. Molesting a little fat girl is unlikely, ‘like molesting a giant basketball’ [140]. Unwashed plates of baked beans are left around ‘like the scenes of tiny slaughters’ [169]. Comic deflations accompany the heroine’s physical deflation in size: footsteps are heard mounting stairs as a spiritualist church service starts and once the prayer is reached, ‘Distantly, we heard a toilet flush, and the footsteps came back down’ [107].

What is more, this time the chocolate chip moments (there are many) belong in something palatable, like a chocolate chip cookie. True, the chocolate isn’t Lindt or Belgian or even Thornton’s. The chips are budget – Hershey at best.

This novel is particularly funny about how a novel may be cynically faked by someone writing about what they don’t know: historical love affairs. Joan quickly deduces that historical fiction, at least at the trashiest end of the market, is essentially costume writing. The cloaked hero thrusts his hand into the heroine’s fichu. The genre is a clothes fetish in words. So the would-be writer of historical fiction needs to arm herself with a large wardrobe of sartorial terms.

More significantly, Lady Oracle is Margaret Atwood at her best because she is writing about what she does know best: a female writer with alibis, ‘a sorry assemblage of lies and aliases’, and other earnestly bungled cover stories which are, she realises, far from ‘watertight’ [211, 152]. Improbably, punning on ‘lurid’, Joan blames a chapter’s lurid tone on the colour of her ink: ‘in apple-green it was more lurid than I’d intended’ [131].

 ‘I don’t like to think I’m doing the same thing over and over’, Atwood said in a 1986 interview. Does any of the following sound familiar?

‘Why had I concocted this trashy and essentially melodramatic script, which might end by getting us all killed in earnest?’ [302]. (Compare Oryx and Crake.) Or this? ‘A fundamental rule’: if you look ridiculous, ‘you may as well pretend you meant to’ [48]. ‘Being a bad cook [read: writer] was much easier than learning to be a good one, and the extra noise and flourishes didn’t strain my powers of invention’ [210]. ‘I wasn’t as good at bad ends as I later became’ [156]. (Or as bad at bad ends as Margaret Atwood later became.) The rubbishy parts of the Delacourt oeuvre come with the standard disclaimer: ‘Of course they were cheap and frivolous, I said, but I had never claimed I was a serious writer’ [160]. We learn that the one seriously regarded part of Joan’s writing, Lady Oracle, was the result of an automatic writing experiment: ‘The manuscript had been dictated by powers beyond my control’ [224] – spiritual forces in this case, social ones in Atwood’s. And, predictively: ‘Maybe I’ll try some science fiction’ and ‘Even in my fantasies I remained faithful to a few ground rules of reality’ [345, 102]. (Compare The Handmaid’s Tale).

And what about Lady Oracle’s admission that ‘seductive ringlets, tendrils and strands, they always featured in Paul’s books’ [284]? Or that ‘bad things always happened to the clothes of my heroines’ [232]? Mildew usually happens to the clothes of Atwood’s heroines. And she’s got a thing for self-covered buttons – as well as similes comparing chickens to various parts of the female arm, for heroines unperturbed by flashers, for colouring-in, childhood incidents in ravines, God spying on us, spirits using windows as doors, men steering women chauvinistically by the elbow. The desert saints are her staple historical reference. Atwood is especially fixated on maxims to do with the numbers one and two. ‘There’s more than one cat in any bag’ [Lady Oracle, 41]. ‘There’s more than one way to skin a cat, my father used to say; it bothered me, I didn’t see why they would want to skin a cat even one way. I stared at the wall and thought of maxims: two can play that game’ [Surfacing, 86]. ‘“Two can play at that game,” said the man. ‘Any number can play,” said Jimmy’s father’ [Oryx and Crake, 21]. Any number of examples could be found in Atwood as well, but I will select just one more: ‘“Think twice”, said Reenie. Laura said, “Why only twice?”’ [The Blind Assassin, 513].

Indeed. After Lady Oracle, it becomes Atwood’s motto. Why bore readers once when you can do it twice?

Blame Boredom

‘I don’t like to think I’m doing the same thing over and over,’ Atwood said in a 1986 interview. ‘I would die of boredom if I felt I were doing that.’ She sounded terminal already, however: ‘I get bored with writing in the first person, so I switch to the third. [Compare The Edible Woman.] I get bored with writing in the present tense, so I switch to the past. [Compare Surfacing.] I get bored with having just a single narrator, so I have three instead of one.’ [Compare Life Before Man.] As we know by now, whenever Atwood has a limitation as a writer, she presents it in her fiction as a deliberate strategy, a self-conscious achievement. So it is no surprise that her next novel, Bodily Harm (1981) used the familiar alibis – plus boredom.

The central character Rennie is a writer (naturally, not a very good one) and she is also (wait for it) ‘an expert on boredom, having done a piece on it for Pandora’s “Relationships” column in which she claimed there were two people involved in boredom, not just one: the borer and the boree’ [19]. (Atwood and the reader?) Rennie, a journalist, is a professional trend-spotter. And boredom is all the rage in Atwood’s middle novels. It’s what she wore to work in the 1980s. Here’s Rennie falling predictably for her doctor: ‘It was expected. Falling in love with your doctor was something middle-aged married women did, women in the soaps, women in nurse novels and in sex-and-scalpel epics with titles like Surgery and nurses with big tits… Rennie could not stand being guilty of such a banality’ [33]. It’s the old alibi – of acknowledging the trashy stereotype you want to use – with the addition of the new boredom. ‘“I am so bored!!!”’ young Cordelia enthuses, two Atwood novels later, in Cat’s Eye (1989) [221].

Page after merciless page of these middle novels is written in the present tense, chapter after chapter wearily beginning, ‘Elizabeth is sitting’ or ‘Elizabeth sits’ (Life Before Man, 15, 28, 43, 91, 111, 127, 168, 217, 252). It is all relentlessly unhappening. After three early Atwood novels in which the dotty heroine perceives reality fantastically and withdraws from it literally as well as imaginatively, these next four novels record the monotony of existence. Solidity of specification, stolidity of specification for the clinically depressed, the dulled, the imprisoned. There are goodish touches reminiscent of the Atwood who wrote Lady Oracle ­– ‘Distantly, like tiny thunder, their child is rolling marbles across the floor’ [Life Before Man, 4]. But otherwise we get the tortures, not the pleasures, of realism; the limits, not the extent, of the technique. Atwood has described herself as a realist novelist and it is, besides, the primary mode of the modern novel. So it matters, centrally.

The much-celebrated Handmaid’s Tale (1985) belongs to this set of self-consciously banal and nullifying novels, but it has so overshadowed everything else that we forget its precursors. ‘The décor is nondescript’, Rennie notes in Bodily Harm [42]. Offred’s minutely slow examinations of her bare room in The Handmaid’s Tale are boredom taken as far as it can go. Everything is noticed, not because it is pleasurable to notice things, but because it substitutes for pleasure when there is nothing else to do. Looking at an egg, for example, gives Offred ‘intense pleasure’, but she is suspicious: ‘possibly this is how I am expected to react. If I have an egg, what more can I want?’ [120]. In other words, the kind of solid physical detail we expect and enjoy in a realist novel is dystopian for Margaret Atwood: it is what miserable people do. It is what she herself tries, miserably, to do, because the descriptions are in fact far from pleasurable.

Fifteen years later, in The Blind Assassin, detail is equally dismal. The elderly Iris start chapters predictably with a description of the weather that is also a comment on global warning. This is apt in one respect: Margaret Atwood must be, by now, the most environmentally-friendly of writers. Recycling herself endlessly.

A great writer can make anything pleasurable and interesting and new, as Plato feared: ‘He won’t regard anything as beneath him. He will try to imitate everything, seriously and in public – even what we were speaking of just now, thunder and the noise of wind and hail, axle and pulley, the sound of trumpets, oboes, pipes, and all kinds of instruments, the cries of dogs, sheep, and birds’ [The Republic, Book 3]. Plato looked far into the future and saw James Joyce. But a vision of Margaret Atwood would have consoled him.

Because Margaret Atwood can make anything boring.

And while Atwood is more than capable of boring us the first time, she also bores us repeatedly. Boringly she repeats her jokes about boringness. Here’s Cat’s Eye again: ‘Once it was fashionable to say how dull it was. First prize a week in Toronto, second prize two weeks in Toronto’ [13]. There’s the same lack of excitement in Atwood’s recent novella The Penelopiad: ‘First prize, a week in Penelope’s bed, second prize, two weeks in Penelope’s bed’ [105]. In the same paragraph of Cat’s Eye, the last novel Atwood wrote in the 1980s, the heroine drew the new boredom to a close – in a self-conscious disavowal of the strategy the Atwood novel had depended on for a decade: ‘Everyone who lived here said those things: provincial, self-satisfied, boring. If you said that, it showed you recognised these qualities but did not partake of them yourself’ [14].

It is not only Atwood’s reuse of phrases and images (not to mention alibis) that is boring and lazy, if inevitable in a profuse writer who is not a great stylist. Larger templates give away that Margaret Atwood is, like her author-characters, writing for the mass production line. This is true of her trio of successively Booker-nominated novels, Alias Grace (1996), The Blind Assassin (2000) and Oryx and Crake (2003). Elements of the success of Alias Grace are feebly copied in the two that follow. For example, the central character (Grace, Iris, Snowman) always has a female mental companion (Mary Whitney, Reenie, Oryx). This person is constantly present in thoughts like, “As Mary used to say… As Reenie told me once…” This companion is always dead. So we know that Oryx is dead, long before Snowman confirms it, because the last two were. Atwood sticks to her story.

But the story told most clearly by these prized duds, The Blind Assassin and Oryx and Crake, is the decline and rise of a novelist. It’s obvious from her interviews that Atwood, now the author of more than 40 books, is enormously proud of surviving, stubbornly ignoring criticism, crushing her own fear that people might think her writing is silly, taking first prize in the staring-out contest. There are limits, however, to one person’s resources (geniuses always excepted). As Leda Sprott, alias Eunice P Revele, admits in Lady Oracle: ‘sometimes I had the truth to tell; there’s no mistaking it when you do. When I had no truth to tell, I told them what they wanted to hear. I shouldn’t have done that’ [207]. It will be clear by now that there is no evidence that Margaret Atwood is a genius, and very little to suggest that she is a good writer. The Blind Assassin, arguably written badly because it is voiced for Iris, has turned out not to be an aberration. There is bad writing everywhere in Atwood, who is an alibi-artist – sometimes very comically, on behalf of her characters, mostly very dismally, on behalf of her own incompetence.

I could go on, but I’ll leave that to Margaret Atwood.