Margaret Atwood is one of my favorite authors, and I don't think I have missed reading any of her novels. I still love the portrayal of the sixties in this book, and I still love the women at the center. The narrative weaves back and forth from the perspective of the women, now mature, in 1990, and looks back at a number of parts of their lives, entirely set in Toronto. There's a lot of action in the book, but I'm just going to tell you a bit about these women characters.
At the beginning of the book, in 1990, three of the women -- old friends from their university days -- meet at a restaurant called the Toxique. They pick from a menu of "Rabbit Delite with grated carrots, cottage cheese and cold lentil salad," or "Thick-cut Gourmet Toasted cheese Sandwich on Herb and Caraway Seed bread, with Polish Pickle," or the "Middle East Special, with felafel and shashlik and couscous and hummus." (p. 29) Atwood makes their choices reflect who they are, a perfect introduction to the three main characters.
There's Charis, who has the Rabbit Delite. She's a hippie who lives on an island in the lake just outside Toronto, and in the 1990 part of the book she works for Shanita, another sixties holdover who runs a shop with fun little hippie goods. Atwood captures the buzzy inner life of Charis, who sees colored light radiating from everyone, light that tells her if they are good or bad. Atwood also captures the cleverness of Shanita who is changing over the shop because demand for hippie things has waned in 1990. "We can keep some of the rocks and herbal goop," she says, "but we'll put that stuff at the back." Instead of this type of merchandise:
"Shanita is busy ordering fresh stock items: little kits for making seedling-transplanting pots out of recycled newspaper, other kits for pasting together your own Christmas cards out of cut-up magazines, and yet another card kits involving pressed flowers and shrink wrap that you do with a hair dryer." (p. 414)
Roz, who has the Thick-cut Toasted Cheese at the Toxique, is the opposite of a hippie: she's a very successful Toronto entrepreneur and investor, who runs both her family of three children and her business with great authority over her employees, both domestic and commercial. Roz has twin daughters, Paula and Erin, age fifteen. They subtly make fun of her when she uses toned-down swear words. She can't find her coffee grinder so she says, "Darn it, kids... Did you move my grinder?"
"Darn it!" says Paula "Oh, my darned grinder. Oh gosh darn it to heck!"
"Oh golly jeez, oh Holy Moly," says Erin. They think it's hilarious, the way Roz can't bring herself to really swear. But she can't. (p. 77)
The way the twins talk to Roz illustrates the way Atwood plays with words, one of my favorite things about her incredibly well-observed prose. The twins insult each other with made-up curses, "Selfish rotten cesspool." "Unshaved armpit!" "Festering tampon." But they are both sympathetic and amused by their mother, contributing to the great portrayal of this character in the book.
Tony, who ordered the Toxique Middle East Special, is a professor at the University of Toronto, with a specialty in the history of war; in the sixties she was offbeat, and in 1990 she's still offbeat and re-enacts historic battles on a sand table in the basement of her Victorian house, "a turreted fortress" where for example, she cooks dinners for her husband West: "some noodle casserole or other from The Joy of Cooking, the 1967 edition. It's odd how Tony's the only one of them who has actually ended up with a man." (p. 387)
Finally, there's Zenia, who only appears at the Toxique at the end of the initial lunch. A very unexpected appearance as they all thought she was dead. Zenia for years has been the arch-enemy of all three women. She has at various times entangled their men through a combination of femme fatale looks and a web of lies and grabs of sympathy. Zenia's ability to find the weaknesses of her prey and deceive each character is a tour-de-force of writing. She might be the best female villain I know of. Sometimes she says she's a "White Russian," from an aristocratic family who lived in Paris, "some sort of a countess." She has a lot of other stories too.
Zenia was involved with the partners of Tony and Charis during the sixties, Then, in a return to Toronto in the early 1980s, she came back and contacted Roz. At a lunch of "radicchio salads and exotic parboiled vegetables and clever pastas," Zenia had told Roz how she was rescued from the Nazis in Berlin by an aunt and taken to London. She convinces Roz that she was a war reporter "with incidents of stones and bullets that have whizzed past her head, of cameras that have been broken by policemen, of narrow escapes in Jeeps." She published war stories, she explains, under the name of male reporters because "she didn't want to open the door in the middle of the night and find some enraged Arab or Irish hit man or Israeli or drug lord standing on the other side of it." Roz hires her to work in a magazine that Roz owns. Not a good decision for Roz, it turns out. (p. 364)
Rereading some of Atwood's books seems to be a good idea for the moment, for this period of enforced lockdown. I've started with The Robber Bride, which was originally published in September, 1993 -- you can see my original copy at the beginning of this post. As I have always read Atwood's books as soon as I could get them, it's thus been 27 years since I first read this one, though I've reread it at least once, during a trip to Toronto in 2007, when I looked around the neighborhood described in the novel.
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