Good Bones - Margaret Atwood [29]
Atwood creates her own contes. One of my favourites is “In Love With Raymond Chandler.” Somehow she always finds her eccentric way into the heart of the matter. Here she reminds us why we are attached to Chandler. He is not the detective writer of grisly murders and steamy sex, but the detective of furniture, of those antimacassars and mahogany desks, of bedroom suites.
Two of the contes were commissioned by Michigan Quarterly Review for special issues on the female and the male body. The first editorial inquiry to Atwood came as a request for a submission “entirely devoted to the subject of ‘The Female Body.’ Knowing how well you have written on this topic … this capacious topic.” She is so quick that she immediately picks up the kernel of her tale, telling us of the aging of her capacious topic: “My topic feels like hell.” In the course of the tale, she shows how this topic, the female body, has been exploited and misused, by itself and by society; how it is used to sell and is sold. We know and need to know these things, but it is the wit with which this often overworked topic speaks that makes it fresh and disturbing.
“Alien Territory” is the male twin to this piece, and here she returns briefly to the tale of Bluebeard. This may be the single most slippery story in the whole repertoire of fairy tales, and it holds endless fascination for Atwood. As an undergraduate at university, she was already listening to Béla Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle and drawing water colours of The Robber Bridegroom. Through decades of writing, she has continued to probe the story’s dark entrails. In “Bluebeard’s Egg,” the title story of her 1983 collection, she refers to the traditional version in which the three sisters, in sequence, discovered dismembered bodies of previous wives in Bluebeard’s castle. In the version she invents in Good Bones, the third sister finds a small dead child with its eyes wide open locked in Bluebeard’s secret room. The narrator, whose motive, like that of many modern women, is to heal Bluebeard, obviously has no idea how far down into his psyche she will have to go to do so.
Atwood insisted that “The Female Body” and “Alien Territory” were to be called not essays, but “pieces.” They are driven by a deeply moral imagination, and fraught with warnings: as a civilization we are destroying ourselves. In the tour de force “My Life as a Bat,” the narrator decides it was better to be a bat than to be human. She hopes to be a bat again. Reincarnation as an animal would be “At least a resting place. An interlude of grace.” And Atwood offers an evocative vision, through a bat’s eyes, of a world in which there are still goddesses in the caves and grottoes. When asked by The British Defense and Aid Fund for South Africa to donate a manuscript for sale at Sotheby’s to assist students in South Africa and Namibia, Atwood donated “My Life as a Bat.” It carries the full weight of her ironic vision of our collective human achievement.
Good Bones is scrupulously organized and ends with the title story about aging, a subject Atwood confronts with celebratory stoicism. Reading it, I hear W.B. Yeats’s contrapuntal voice speaking of aging in “Sailing to Byzantium”: “An aging man is but a paltry thing / A tattered coat upon a stick … sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal.” I would speculate that Atwood would not entirely approve of Yeats’s egocentric, romantic fantasy of escaping the human through the transcendence of art. Unlike Yeats, she speaks to her aging bones with affection rather than with contempt. There is good in the real, in the minimal, if we could only accept our human limitations. As she urges her bones to the top of the stairs, she speaks to them as to a faithful dog: “There. We’re at the top. Good Bones! Good Bones! Keep on going.”
In Good Bones, Margaret Atwood may insist that the reader look at hard truths, but she never forgoes her belief in magic and the transformative powers of the imagination. As