I have been wanting to read this for years. It’s been on my to-read list for close to 15 years. A friend in university was reading this, and I caught a glimpse of the cover (here in the featured image above) and the title. “But no,” the friend insisted, “it really is very good”.
I get the apologia from the friend. The cover is pulpy. The title is pulpy. From those two alone one could be forgiven that this is pulpy trash (it isn’t). Back in the mid 2000’s, Atwood was not the household name that she is now, with right wing America using her work as playbook, and a nice HBO series to capitalize on all this happening. She was still a niche author for people interested in limited subjects: people into para-literature, people into feminism, and Canadians. The friend who recommended this to me was into the latter two categories.
Now that I’ve read it, I think I get the apologia even more. The initial chapters feel a bit all over the place – pulpy fiction, not-so-pulpy fiction, then a sort of post-modern ‘all these narratives will weave together’ feeling before finally seeming to settle on a early twentieth century coming of age narrative featuring two sisters living on an estate. I do have to admit that I found the character of Laura to be freakishly relatable to myself, mostly in her disquiet with religion and how her young philosophical mind challenged the people around her. There are some conflicts between capitalism and socialism, but mostly the story is about how the two sisters are kind of treated as objects by their society. By not spoiling the story, I think I am coming off as dismissive. Plot wise it was very good, buttressed largely by Atwood’s skill as a writer.
And I say that despite the fact that parts of the story grated on my working class sensibilities (I relate so poorly to the notion of being raised with a ‘governess’ that I almost outright refuse to read anything from that historical era). As far as interweaving narratives coming together, other books certainly did it better. I tend to find that when writers do things like that, the more adventurous the better. Here, you get a pretty good idea where the story is getting by the time you hit 25% of the book. It telegraphs the point pretty hard.
All things considered, this was a mixed bag of a book, but I think I liked it well enough. I am glad to have finally put it away.
Failures in Polymathy 