Oh No, Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood books on my bookshelf:
I count 22 of them

I have now read Margaret Atwood's newest book, Madd Addam, published last week. I am painfully disappointed. I say this as a nearly lifelong Atwood fan. I own almost all her books, including this one, in hard cover because I can never wait for the paperbacks. I have even read her poetry -- and I never read poetry, generally.

Madd Addam is the third in a trilogy, which began with Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. Though not exactly fantasy, Oryx and Crake is a work of great imagination and humor. Maybe sardonic humor -- it's about a dystopian very-near-future when bioscience has gotten out of hand and global warming and other disasters have completely overtaken humanity. In fact, humanity has nearly been wiped out by a crazed attack by one of the genius scientists. Almost all the life in the book consists of strange genetic modifications of beasts and near-humans, and one lonely surviving man. But it's not that sad because the imaginativeness is really charming. The Year of the Flood begins before the disaster, and introduces a few new survivors and their quirky stories. In both, Margaret Atwood's brilliant writing ability in this and her previous books always makes me want to read more and more.

Madd Addam seems to me to lack any new imaginative inventions. Basically, the beasts and near-humans are the same as they were in the earlier volumes, no new ideas. The human characters, too, are mainly leftover from the two earlier books in the trilogy; the narrative about one man, Zeb, is the best part, but rather diluted by what I see as the theoretical stuff about human messing around with the environment and genetic mods.

Some of the inventive ideas from the earlier books are used in a way that is repetitive and ultimately annoying. For example, the genetic near-humans have trouble understanding subtleties, so the humans have to tell them simplified made-up tales. In Oryx and Crake, these are very amusing, and subtly explore how myths are made. The trope becomes burdensome when repeated in nearly every chapter of Madd Addam. The myths of the group known as God's Gardeners were poetic in The Year of the Flood; there was deep irony in the efforts of these persecuted dissidents. To me it became kind of a formula in Madd Addam.

In my reading experience, I've always found that it's hard for an author to sustain a vivid fantasy through a number of sequels. J.K.Rowling did it well in Harry Potter. L.Frank Baum usually had a couple of new inventions to sustain the Oz series, though the hack writers that took over from him were pretty hopeless. Even Through the Looking Glass is a little more systematic and less spontaneous than Alice in Wonderland, I think, though both are excellent. More recent series such as the Hunger Games and Dark Materials trilogies have some of the same flaws of becoming repetitive and losing spontanaity.

My first experience with such a thing was when I was around 8 or 9 and read the sequel to my favorite book The Princess and the Goblin. It was so disappointing that I cried, because it wasn't as vividly magical, but I've never had the nerve to reread it so I can't say what really bothered me. I guess I won't cry for Margaret Atwood. I hope she writes a better book in the future.

A Cultural Evening

Culture! Last night I watched Downton Abbey season 3, part 1 & 2, and also finished the last few pages of J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy. I’ll start with Rowling. As a long-time Harry Potter fan, having read the books and seen the movies more than once each, I felt at home with Rowling’s style – but I constantly felt that this was a book about muggles. (Surely you know that “muggles” are what the wizards in Harry Potter call non-magical people).

Rowling hates muggles. She sets the scene with the death of a muggle man – a much-beloved citizen and civic leader in the town of Pagford: which I can’t help thinking is an extension of Harry Potter’s awful muggle family on Privet Drive. In the muggle world of Pagford, death is painful, distasteful, and messy. Funerals are boring and uncomfortable. A magical curse administered with a wave of an evil wand is so very preferable – the victim drops, his spirit hovers for a moment, and his body is unchanged and unmoving at least until the end of the description. So dignified. Despite grief and despair, wizards have a sense of purpose which keeps them going as they mourn. Not all the bereaved in Pagford are so lucky.

What mainly motivates good wizards in the Harry Potter books is a desire to propagate the arts of wizardry and defend their world from pure evil in the persona of purely evil Voldmort and in his followers. Bad wizards are simply motivated by this pure evil with maybe a little resentment and hatred left from their childhood. What mainly movates people in Pagford is spite, resentment of authority (or love of being in authority), a sense of class distinctions, anger at how life had treated them, or some combination. Every character has at least a few of these basically banal motives, which drive most of the plot. Despite the concentration on social interactions, I don’t find that The Casual Vacancy works well as a comedy of manners like Jane Austen’s or the kind of book Margaret Atwood or Doris Lessing wrote before they turned to distopian fantasies.

Teenagers quickly become the focus of The Casual Vacancy after the first scene. Their lives are miserable and their bodies are their enemies. There’s nobody like Hagrid to come take them away to any alternate world like the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. They hate or resent their lives and families, torment and bully one another, and know in their hearts that they will never escape growing up to be just like their parents – or can’t imagine ever being grown up. Writing about teenagers  is definitely Rowling’s strength, and it really comes out in The Casual Vacancy. She skillfully portrays their concerns with how to grow up and become real people or authentic, as Fats, one of the principal characters of the book, puts it.

Along with teenage misery, The Casual Vacancy is a study in contrast between the lives of insiders (pure white British people with a strong work ethic though maybe a lot of hangups) versus the lives of outsiders (Asian doctors; drug-addicted petty criminals and welfare dependents). The only person who ever went from outsider to insider is the man who died at the very beginning of the story, and no one can duplicate his idealism about the future of this society's victims or his pleasure in trying to improve society. The rest of the characters’ pleasures often seem to come from hurting someone else. The only magic they find is hacking into someone’s Facebook page or the town council’s online message board.

Some of the insiders, like teachers or social workers, try to help the less fortunate, but being well-meaning in this story is kind of boring. The Asian doctors treat both the upper and the lower classes, which I guess is because socialized medicine in Britain is a leveler – something I hadn’t thought about much, but found interesting. But the strongest connections between insiders and outsiders arise through hatred, contempt, mean-spiritedness, and efforts by the insiders to increase the misery and marginal nature of the outsiders’ lives. The main plot revolves around the desire of the insiders to cut off government support for a drug-addiction-treatment clinic and to stop poor children from attending Pagford’s good middle-class schools. That’s really mean.

People writing about Harry Potter books have complained because there are no gay characters except Dumbledore, whom Rowling revealed to be gay long after the books were published. (Dumbledore showed no signs of it in anything written down.) Well, in The Casual Vacancy, there’s a gay character who is likeable and has a sense of humor, which distinguishes her from almost all the other characters. But she’s only in one short chapter of the 500+ page book – and the rest of the references to gay people are taunts and cruel name-calling from sadistic fathers and vicious school bullies.

This sole gay character’s remarks provide one of the few humorous moments in the book, as she is able to make rather pointed and insightful quips about her family. But she hates Pagford and quickly gets in her beautiful car and returns to her much more satisfactory life with her partner and her high-paying job. The remainder of the book us unfortunately quite short on humor, as far as I noticed. I hope I’m wrong; I wish someone would tell me what I missed.

In Downton Abbey season 3, the creepy Crawley family are still trying to save their beloved castle, their aristocratic way of life, and their servants’ jobs and downstairs status for future generations. Not much I can say about it except it’s a great escape! All that wealth! All those servants (despite their squabbling)! All those evening gowns! In comparison, in The Casual Vacancy, the muggles who populate the town of Pagford want to save the town from drug addicts and low life welfare cases. Their motives are much uglier than the Crawley’s. They don't even give good parties. Other than that parallel, the two don’t have much in common.

Incidentally: in Downton Abbey I thought Shirley MacLaine was great; a perfect opposite to Maggie Smith. I wish that Mrs. Levinson, her character, hadn’t really gone back to America for the rest of the season, but I know she did. And I hope that in some future novel, J.K. Rowling will go back to imagining an alternate world where unhappy but properly gifted teenagers can find a better life than in the world of their muggle families. Even the world of Downton Abbey has some kind of magic in it, despite taking tons of [American] money to make the magic work.

Margaret Atwood's Toronto

Here we are on Bloor Street -- Atwood territory. This morning we plan a walk along several other streets, including Chinatown, also mentioned in The Robber Bride. However, Atwood's characters weren't staying at a Holiday Inn, and they were immersed in the University of Toronto and surrounding environments, not just visiting. I always like to read about the places I visit. I thought it was a good pick for take-along reading, out of all the books in my attic.

Also, the first night we were here, I bought a Canadian edition of Atwood's The Tent. It's not "set" anywhere -- it's a series of poems and very brief sketches. But it evokes some of the atmosphere of the area: City. Not totally different from cities across the border. But more of some things, less of others. More brick Victorian buildings. Little green yards with lots of flowers. Big 60s or 70s apartment towers dwarfing the older houses. Little shops selling fruit or "natural foods" -- the kind of dusty healthfood store that's disappeared from home, thanks to Whole Foods and wider interest.

Among the nice gardens, one beautiful old fraternity was so brick and so Gothic Victorian it looked like a haunted house. The neglected yard had ailanthus trees for foundation plantings. (Those are the weediest of volunteers, if your plant vocabulary isn't great -- mine may not be great either, if ailnthus is the wrong word, I mean those weed trees!)

The museum, like many nearby buildings is 100 year old brick institutional style. It has a brand-new extension of glass and steel with very diagonal walls. Unfortunately, most of the exhibit rooms are still rearranging and I presume attending to their political correctness. I enjoyed the Chinese and Native Canadian exhibits. The new extension is the edgiest thing around, but there are lots of old buildings sprouting new steel and glass towers or bridges to nearby older buildings.

UPDATE: When I returned to Ann Arbor, I finished reading The Robber Bride. As the narrative follows three women -- Tony, Charis, and Roz -- and their nemesis, named Zenia, it continues to be fully embedded in the Toronto neighborhood where we stayed. I have been a Margaret Atwood fan from her first novels and poetry, and I definitely enjoyed this opportunity to get a new insight into one of her books.

Margaret Atwood: The Penelopiad

I have just read The Penelopiad. In it Margaret Atwood amusingly retells the story of Odysseus's faithful wife in her own words. The time is now. The location is Hades, the fields of asphodel. After millenia as a shade, Penelope is still jealous of gorgeous, selfish, vain Helen. She's still angry for a lifetime of mistreatment and increasingly irritated at mythological misinformation about herself. We hear all about the dishonest nature of wily Odysseus, how she often saw through his tricks, and how much less savory he was in "reality" than in Homer's version. As a shade, she knows all about Homer's version and all the subsequent versions.

Penelope doesn't like her life in Hades much; however, she resists rebirth. In contrast, since his death Odysseus has been "a French general, he's been a Mongolian invader, he's been a tycoon in America, he's been a headhunter in Borneo. He's been a film star, an inventor, an advertising man." (p. 189-90)

My favorite quote from poor Penelope: "More recently, some of us have been able to infiltrate the new ethereal-wave system that now encircles the globe, and to travel around that way, looking out at the world through the flat, illuminated surfaces that serve as domestic shrines. Perhaps that's how the gods were able to come and go as quickly as they did back then -- they must have had something like that at their disposal." (p. 19)

It's a good fun read -- far less challenging than many books by Atwood.

As I read I began to think how many authors have loved to retell old stories in new ways and forms: classic stories from mythology, Arthurian legend, Shakespeare, etc. Some retellings are straightforward; others, like West Side Story, reuse the essential plot in modern dress. The best, like Atwood's tale, refocus from the point of view of a minor or underdeveloped character. The goal may be irony, politics, or curiosity.

My mind exploded with examples:

• Virgil wrote the Aeneid to create a Roman founder myth based in the Trojan war.
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court provided Mark Twain with ironic distance from the follies of his own era.
  
• Jean Rhys wrote Wide Sargasso Sea to recreate the first Mrs. Rochester. (She's not the only one to write a story based on this unloved madwoman.)
• Anita Diamant's best seller The Red Tent tried a historic-anthropological take on women in early biblical times through the character of Dinah.
• Wicked, first a novel, later a hit musical, devised a new adults-only personality for the Wicked Witch of Oz. (Author Gregory Maguire has subsequently redone several other children's stories in the same vein.)
• An older Broadway success is The Skin of Our Teeth -- Thornton Wilder mines the Bible. Cute and universal. Now material for high school drama clubs.
  
• In a heavier spirit, Par Lagerkvist created an identity for the crucified thief of Golgotha in Barabbas. (I think this blip has left the radar screen.)
  
• Aldous Huxley offered a distopian version of The Tempest in Brave New World.
• And I can't forget Hollywood's homage to Emma, the movie Clueless.
  

After winning a lawsuit about copyright, Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone -- same story, slave's point of view, Gone With the Wind -- dropped out of sight like a stone. I've never read either book. But I've read/seen all the others on this list. And I know there are lots more, such as at least two more recent retells borrowing characters from Jane Austen novels.

The lawsuit proved that this kind of book isn't a crime. Is it a genre? I don't know.