My Atwood Project, Part 19: The End

Well, I did it, I finished the project: I read or re-read all of Margaret Atwood’s published novels and short stories/short fiction. I read one of her children’s books, too, and some of the non-fiction.

What did I come away with? An even greater admiration for this great writer. I noticed repetition of motifs -- love triangles, lukewarm mothers, political unrest, evil aunts -- but I never got bored. (And let me tell you, I do get bored when a writer repeats the same motifs ad nauseam, like John Irving with his never-ending bears and prostitutes…) 

I found each novel fresh and original. 

I found that most of the traditional short stories (as opposed to the experimental short fiction) felt like the seed of a potential novel.

I found concern for our planet, and humanity as a whole, but especially for women. 

I found clever wordsmithing. 

I found stories nested inside of stories.

I found trios of women friends.

I’ve been asked about my favorites. I would have to say the first two books of the MaddAddam trilogy: Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood, because of the detailed worldbuilding and three-dimensional characters. Atwood’s speculations are founded in real science, making the series scary in a too-close-to-home way. Why these over The Handmaid’s Tale? The explorations of the variety of ways of living in this not-too-far-off future are more interesting to me than the frighteningly flat future of The Handmaid’s Tale, though I confess Gilead is probably just as likely. 

If you are not into sci-fi, I would recommend The Blind Assassin, which won her first Booker prize. This is probably the most densely layered story-within-a-story narrative, with a twist on the love triangle that I won’t spoil for you. Or if you're a Shakespeare fan, Hag-Seed is a must.

Would I do it again? Yes. This time I would read it all in chronological order, as I set out to do, rather than grouping the two series (The Handmaid's Tale and MaddAddam) together.

I went on to read a couple of books that Atwood mentioned in the memoir. Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women (1971) is a connected series of episodes about a girl growing up in rural Canada. I didn't find it as engaging as Atwood’s work, in part because the chapters are very long, but I do see a similarity to Atwood’s eccentric mother figures, and the girlhood friendships that fade and rekindle. I can also identify with the smart young college-bound woman who lets hormones make decisions for her. 

I’m currently reading Ways of Telling (2026) by Xandra Bingley, a publishing professional who became a friend of Atwood’s after finding her a place to stay during her travels to the UK. Atwood writes the introduction here, trying her best to describe the nearly indescribable prose of these short narrative pieces. So far, they all have unconventional punctuation or very little punctuation at all, which makes reading them like drinking from a hose, or listening to multiple conversations in a crowded restaurant. UPDATE: After finishing this book, I'd say the stream of consciousness, write what you hear (or think) style is best suited to the chapters about a horse fair (and its jumble of merchandise and people) and Princess Diana's death, another jumble of people waiting out the long night before her funeral procession.

Next up: my reflections on several different guided journals. 

My Atwood Project, Part 18: Old Babes in the Wood, and Cut and Thirst

This last (for now?) collection of fifteen short stories, Old Babes in the Wood (2023), is bookended with a few stories about Nell and Tig, who are stand-ins for Atwood and her long-term partner Graeme Gibson, as she explains in the memoir -- see my post on Moral Disorder. 

"My Evil Mother," also issued as a standalone ebook in 2022, continues with the exploration of Atwood's mother figures. As most are, this one is cool and practical, but also maybe a witch. The story ends with you asking yourself about the fictions that parents create in order to protect their children. 

"Impatient Griselda" imagines a quarantine where  humans are helped by aliens who look like octopuses. The alien tells a quarantine group the story of the Griselda sisters: Patient Griselda marries an abusive noble, while Impatient Griselda follows her and works in the kitchen until she can seize her moment. When one of the humans questions this version of "Patient Griselda," which only has one young woman in it, the alien entertainer defends their version. A delightful example of strangemaking.

Another example is “Metempsychosis: Or, the Journey of the Soul” which “corrects” misconceptions about reincarnation by telling of a snail reincarnated as a customer service representative. What could they possibly have done to deserve this?? Also, note that neither the extraterrestrial nor the snail fits into binary male/female categories.

Two stories about historical figures, George Orwell and Hypatia of Alexandria, imagine interviews with them from beyond the grave.

One of the most intriguing stories is "Freeforall," which imagines a different way that the situation in The Handmaid's Tale could have gone. In both worlds, fertility is declining. Here, the cause is a rampant virus. The solution is Houses, which raise uninfected children and trade them for marriage. The Freeforall is an area in each city where infected people must live, much like the pleeblands in the MaddAddam series. 

For Atwood, writing about the dead often means writing about what they read. Atwood's farewell story to her father in Moral Disorder includes his enjoyment of a book about a failed expedition; here, her farewell to Graeme, “Wooden Box,” includes his enjoyment of the French inspector Maigret stories. “A Dusty Lunch” is a tribute to Graeme’s father, and includes letters and poems from his war days. 

"Airborne: A Symposium" introduces us to the trio of Chrissy, Leonie, and Myrna, who will reappear in "Cut and Thirst" (2024) which I found much more entertaining. In this latter story, an ebook standalone, the three aging women friends rally around Fern. When Fern left a self-important old white male out of her anthology, he and his cronies punished her with literary criticism. Don't they deserve to die? Or at least to eat Ex-Lax brownies?

The collection is a lovely mix of Atwood staples: the autobiographical, the speculative, strangemaking, contemporary women, historical figures, retelling of a fairy tale. I hope it’s not her last, but if it is, it’s an excellent representation of her breadth and talent.

I've reached the end of my fiction rereading project, and will post on my reflections soon. Stay tuned!

My Atwood Project, Part 17: Ban, Ban, Caliban!

Interesting that both of Atwood’s longer retellings, The Penelopiad and Hag-Seed, were commissioned, even though Atwood dabbled in the form in several short stories, such as “Bluebeard’s Egg.” I don’t count The Robber Bride as a retelling of “The Robber Bridegroom,” because it strays so far; perhaps “inspired by” is a better label.

While my reaction to The Penelopiad was lukewarm, I love Hag-Seed. Perhaps because I have taught The Tempest and am more familiar with that play than with the Iliad, which I am mostly familiar with through my Latin AP study of the Aeneid. What I love are the perfect parallels between the original and the adaptation, and the fact that The Tempest is actually going on inside Atwood’s retelling of The Tempest. Let me explain.

Felix Phillips is a successful director and is planning a production of The Tempest. However, his right hand man Tony is tired of being delegated to, and conspires with the board to get Felix fired. Tony, of course takes over. Felix goes into exile alone but for the ghost of his dead daughter Miranda. Starting to see the parallels? One of the cleverest is "Estelle," a woman with some pull in the government, who personifies the role of auspicious “star.” See what she did there? 

Felix gets a job teaching Shakespeare in a prison. Atwood says, in Book of Lives, "I set the book in a prison because everyone in The Tempest is imprisoned in some way." After a few years of establishing himself, Felix is ready to stage that production that he was never able to finish, and get his sweet revenge at the same time. The theme of prison appears also in Bodily Harm, indirectly in The Handmaid's Tale (the handmaids are not technically incarcerated but they are far from free), and very directly in The Heart Goes Last. 

It’s a delightful romp -- my only complaint is that the revenge goes down a bit too perfectly, but in order to mirror the happy ending of the play, it must, so there we are. If you are not familiar with The Tempest, Atwood includes a summary at the end, or watch the film version with Helen Mirren as Prospera, a female incarnation of the lead role, and Russell Brand as a hilarious Trinculo.

And we're nearly done! One more collection of short stories, and one more uncollected short story.

My Atwood Project, Part 16: The Heart Goes Last

The Heart Goes Last is another speculative novel. I can't quite say post-apocalyptic, because the disaster is less extreme than in Oryx and Crake, and there is no regime change, as in The Handmaid's Tale. Nonetheless, the catastrophe in the background is a financial crisis, and those are plenty apocalyptic for many people. Our two main characters, Charmaine and Stan, have lost their home and are living, if you can call it that, in their car. Charmaine hears of a new pilot program with job training and persuades Stan to check it out. 

The pilot program is the twin cities of Positron and Consilience. Consilience is a small town with a '50s vibe where Charmaine and Stan can move out of their car and into a home with a real bed. The catch is that every other month they leave the comfy house to their “Alternates” and spend four weeks in the Positron prison. Everyone has a job in both places, prison and town, so everyone is fully employed. 

Before officially signing on, Stan visits his aptly named criminal brother Con, short for Conor, and Conor warns him that no one comes out of that place alive.

I have to say I did not enjoy this book as much as Atwood’s other speculative work. I didn't find the world building as absorbing or detailed and I didn't like the characters as much. Granted, the MaddAddam series had three books in which to do the world building. But even if we just consider the second book, The Year of the Flood, I found the rituals and characters in the God's Gardeners community much more convincing than the faceless inhabitants of the twin cities. I also found the MaddAddam characters, especially Zeb and Toby, three-dimensional, whereas I found Stan to be a “Flat Stanley,” and Charmain no deeper. 

*Spoilers ahead*

We do get a couple of tantalizing glimpses into Charmain’s childhood, but no definitive revelation. Was she molested, and blamed for it? Does this explain her willingness to perform the gruesome prison job of “putting down” the less tractable prisoners in her own gentle way, so they suffer less than she did?

This book veers into the sexual in a couple unusual ways. One might think that when the couple returns to a more or less normal home that their marriage would resume as usual. However, they both become sexually obsessed with an Alternate, someone who occupies the house while they are in prison.

In MaddAddam, the Scales and Tails strip club is more or less what we would see today, with some extra attention to costumes. However, one of the big money-making secrets of the twin cities project is prostibots, or sex robots, customizable of course. And beyond that, top dog bad guy Ed is working with a shady company in Las Vegas to transform a person through laser brain surgery into a sex slave. The person's memories of prior love objects are erased, and they imprint upon the first face they see when they awake from surgery, preferably the person who ordered up the memory wipe. This just seems kind of gratuitous and less plausible Atwood’s usual fare. 

But to end on a positive note, this is an interesting critique of the American prison system and its disproportionately large role in the economy. Corporations are already running prisons for private financial benefit. Take away the laser sex slaves and it reminds me of 1984, a gritty and and in some ways realistic take on a totalitarian future, with a hapless couple caught in the center, forced to make impossible choices.

My Atwood Project, Part 15: Stone Mattress

This collection of “wicked tales” was published in 2015. Atwood takes pains to define “tale” as less true than “story”: “We may safely assume that all tales are fiction, whereas a ‘story’ might well be a true story about what we usually agree to call ‘real life.’” 

The first three are interconnected. "Alphinland" is about Constance, who has recently lost her husband but continues to converse with him; she especially wants to know if he had that affair, like she suspected he did. The title comes from her successful fantasy series, which supported them; C. W. Starr, her nom de plume, seems to be an amalgam of J. K. Rowling and Atwood herself. Atwood's characters often write “subliterary” fiction (her word; see the romance novels in Lady Oracle, for example) to support themselves. Does she actually consider any of her work to be pulp?

“Revenant” switches to the point of view of Constance’s ex, Gavin, and his young wife, Reynolds. He regrets not marrying Constance, and tells Reynolds so. But no time to hash it out, as Reynolds has arranged for him to meet with Naveena, who is writing about his work, or so Reynolds says. In point of fact, she’s writing about Constance, and Gavin is just someone who knew her before she was famous. 

The third story, “Dark Lady,” takes place after Gavin’s death. Jorrie and her twin Tin, fka Marjorie and Martin, learn of Gavin’s funeral, and Jorrie, who was with Gavin after Constance, wants to go and gloat. She hopes Constance will be there…and of course she is. 

“Lusus Naturae” was written for a collection of “strange tales” edited by Michael Chabon, and continues in the undead-ish vein of Happy Zombie Sunrise Home.

“The Freeze-Dried Groom” and “The Dead Hand Loves You” are delightful little horror gems. In the first, a man who uses storage units for drug deals, and whose inner monologue imagines him as a murder victim, discovers a chilling cache, and gets to play out his fantasy. The second reminds me of the first three intertwined stories: a young writer who can’t pay the rent jokingly contracts with his housemates to share the proceeds of his next book. It’s a surprise hit that ties them all uncomfortably together, and he contemplates murdering the people siphoning off his riches. 

“I Dream of Zenia with the Bright Red Teeth” is a return to the characters from The Robber Bride, but with a more sympathetic reading of the man-stealing antagonist Zenia.

The title story is a chilling tale of murder and revenge. When Bob raped 14-year-old Verna, he ruined her life, and set her on a path to seducing older men, then sending them off a little sooner than necessary. She’s plotting to do the same to a man on her cruise -- but he turns out to be Bob. Her revenge is perfectly plotted, using an aptly named piece of fossil called a “stone mattress.” 

Finally, “Torching the Dusties” is about a movement that would scale up Verna’s approach by ridding the country of folks in retirement homes. 

My Atwood Projet, Part 14: The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home

The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home (2013), Atwood’s first publication after the conclusion of the MaddAddam series in 2013, is a quick fun read, a novella that I could only find on Wattpad, in the form of a blog. Is it by Naomi Alderman, author of The Power, and dedicated to Atwood, as the Wattpad blog states? Or was it coauthored by the two of them, as the book cover image suggests? Alderman is mentioned in the memoir as a mentee of Atwood’s, whom she chose because Alderman was not “in awe” of her.  

Happy Zombie alternates between two points of view, that of Okie, a young girl whose mother-turned-zombie has just eaten her father; and Clio, Okie’s grandmother, to whom Okie must now bring her zombie mother for safekeeping. Clio is a familiar Atwood trope: an older woman with a secret and a dim view of the young, like Iris in The Blind Assassin. One might assume that the younger Alderman wrote Okie’s sections, and Atwood wrote Clio’s. 

The plot takes a couple of twists and turns as Okie heads out on her quest to deliver her subdued mother, with the help of delivery driver and love interest Hughes. Clio waits for her granddaughter at home, reflecting on her husband’s experimental anti-Alzheimer’s energy drink, “Glowing Skull,” that launched the  Zombiepocalype.  

If you haven’t read Alderman’s novel The Power (2017), you should. She dedicates it to Atwood and her partner Graeme Gibson. The novel has been compared to The Handmaid’s Tale, and I see Atwood’s mentoring influence, especially in the frame story. The male author of the book, a historian, presents it as “the most plausible narrative” of the time when women gained physical power over men, in the form of electricity generated in organs called “skeins” near their collarbones. This physical power allowed women to control and even rape men, flipping the power dynamic and leading to the situation of female dominance in the frame story. The male author who has researched and written this history appeals to his female mentor for help publishing it; she proposes that he publish under a female name, since no one is likely to believe such an incredible claim coming from a mere man.

This conceit reminds me of the way both The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments are presented within the frame narrative of an academic conference, which reassures us that Gilead did not last, but also casts some doubt on the narratives.

My Atwood Project, Part 13: Moral Disorder

This is the third of three short books that Atwood published in the six years between Oryx and Crake (2003) and the second book of the MaddAddam series, The Year of the Flood (2009). I was looking forward to rereading Moral Disorder (2006) because my favorite Atwood story, “My Last Duchess,” is in it. What an eye-opener to find that every single story (or chapter?) is autobiographical to a certain extent. 

As Atwood says in the memoir: "It’s a mix of Nell and Tig stories—these two characters would appear later in Old Babes in the Wood, and they bear more than a coincidental relationship to Graeme and me—and stories of childhood…. The last two stories, however, are valedictions. A valediction is an act of bidding farewell. The first valediction, ‘The Labrador Fiasco,’ is for my father, who had died ten years before. The second—’The Boys at the Lab’—is for my mother..."

In fact, this seems like a practice memoir, or a first draft of one. The full title is Moral Disorder and Other Stories, and each section has a title on its first page, but in the the table of contents they are simply labeled with chapter numbers, as if it were a single narrative rather than a collection. The title comes from a novel that Graeme started but never finished.

Chapter 1, “The Bad News,” is a Nell and Tig story, which begins in the present and then transposes them to Roman times to show how the more things change, the more they stay the same.

The next four stories are about Atwood’s childhood and youth, all with analogs in the memoir. 

• In Chapter 2, “The Art of Cooking and Serving,” first-person narration, Atwood as a child prepares for the birth of her sister Ruth. It’s an anxiety-inducing time, as their mother is older than is usual -- forty-two, we learn in the memoir.  
• Chapter 3, “The Headless Horseman,” also first person, is about a Halloween costume passed from Atwood to younger sister Ruth.
• Chapter 4, “My Last Duchess,” also first person, is about Atwood’s final year in high school and early boyfriend. I love it because I can relate both to young Margaret, a strong student with a boyfriend, and also to the English teacher, as I became one later. I also love the title poem, which I have taught, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which they also study. 
• Chapter 5, “The Other Place,” first person, recounts in a vague and general way Atwood’s restless first years out of college. 

In Chapter 6, “Monopoly,” we return to the Nell and Tig stories. This is about when Atwood was officially introduced to Tig and Oona’s (Graeme and Shirley's) children as Graeme’s new -- girlfriend? The narrator decides during the story that Oona/Shirley considers her a governess, a glorified babysitter. All this harks back to Life Before Man, the fictionalized story of Graeme’s disaster of an open marriage with Shirley, before committing to Atwood.

 

In Chapter 7, “Moral Disorder,” we continue with Nell and Tig, and all the animals on the farm: how they are acquired, and often, how they die. Considering all this come and go in the animal world leads Nell/Atwood to the realization that Tig/Gibson does not want to marry, or for Nell to have children

Chapter 8, “White Horse,” is also in the Nell and Tig framework, but it’s mostly about Atwood's sister Ruth, called Lizzie in the story, and her mental health struggles. When Atwood let Ruth know that she’d have a chapter in her memoir, Ruth replied, “I don’t actually need one, it's all in Moral Disorder.” 

In Chapter 9, “The Entities,” Oona/Shirley insists that Nell/Atwood buy her a house. Then she dies in it. Again, it’s all real, and in the memoir.

Chapter 10, “The Labrador Fiasco,” returns to the first person, and tells of Atwood’s father’s decline. It contains a story within a story: Atwood’s mother is reading to him an account of a real expedition to Labrador in the Canadian wilderness. The expedition is a fiasco, due to inadequate knowledge and poor preparation. Atwood’s father gleefully imagines how he would have done better. I view this as a reflection on his life as a man who was a successful wilderness trekker.

 

Finally, Chapter 11, “The Boys at the Lab,” continues in the first person and tells of Atwood’s mother’s decline. I found the connection to these “boys,” the students who assisted Atwood’s father, intriguing. I get the impression, from the many cold and abandoning mothers in Atwood’s work, that her mother was not as warm with her children as she was with other adults, that perhaps she regretted leaving behind an independent and unconventional life to become a mother.