The voice from inside the egg

Press, 12 September 1987, Page 27

The voice from inside the egg

Bluebeard’a Egg By Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Cape, 1987, 281 pp. $34,95 The Handmaid’a Tale By Margaret Atwood, Virago, 1987, 324 pp. $14.95 (Reviewed by Reginald Berry) In this title story of “Bluebeard’s Egg,” Sally is the third wife of a prominent heart surgeon. In the creative writing course ("Forms of Narrative Fiction”) she takes to help pass the time, she is given an assignment to write a story about the fable of the wizard’s egg, the egg which symbolises a woman’s relinquishing of identity to the masculine power of entrapment. Unlike all the other students, Sally decides to write the story from the point of view of the egg. I take this as a signal of what Margaret Atwood is about in this superb collection of 12 stories.

This is Atwood’s second collection of stories — the first, “Dancing Girls,” appeared in Canada in 1977 and elsewhere in 1982 — and it shows how differently she is working in short fiction as comparded to her better known novels, including her sixth and most recent, the Booker prize shortlisted, “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Rather than create a contlnous narrative of events leading to an obvious and visible conclusion, here she prefers to build up a series of discrete incidents, very often cutting rapidly back and forth from present to past. The result is not the momentum one expects, but a deepening understanding of character and incident and language one does not normally get. That technique, and especially

Atwood’s supremely poetic ear for the cliches and profundities of the language, guarantees that the stories move away from the ordinary renditions of middle-and-upper-middle-class life which charactise much British and American fiction these days. Atwood’s characters are artists, dentists, psychiatrists, doctors, interior decorators, financial analysts, theatre people, and above all attached, dependent women — just as one would expect in fiction which is predominantly urban in setting — but the stories in which they appear are made to reveal the problems of their lives and emotional language from the inside.

One of the most significant stories here, "The Sunrise,” is about Yvonne, an artist who is incapable of extended friendships and of art which goes beyond the unvarying routines she sets up for it. Now she compulsively draws men’s faces, collarbones, and upper bodies, although she does not know what she will do with these drawings. Before she was known as “the penis lady,” for her scandalous paintings of erect penlses. “The thing about painting penises was that no one ever mistook them for phallic symbols, or indeed for symbols at all. But now she thinks it would be so handy if there were still some language of images like this, commonly known and understood.”

But this is precisely the problem. There are symbols in her life, which could communicate the significances of human existence, but her routine art life and anaesthetised social connections have cut her off from understanding the language of images, and realities, such as the sunrises

which she compulsively watches but can’t explain why. So, too, in a number of the other stories does Atwood create a language of images for the reader to understand, but from which the characters are detached by their inability to understand the traps of their own lives, and to see into the symbolic meanings which lie under the surface of things. This distinction between surface and underground has been a consistent fact of Atwood’s writing from the beginning. Here it is exemplified by those central symbols, as for example, the chemical process in "The Salt Garden,” the rare birds in “The Scarlet Ibis,” the rapids and the coral reef in "Two stories about Emma,” the identification bracelet in “Hurricane Hazel,” and above all the egg in ‘Bluebeard’s Egg.” All of these have real, simple meaning as objects, but also greater value for what they signify which is not so visible. For me the real highlights of “Bluebeard’s Egg” are the four stories of children and parents, which represent a new departure for Atwood, at least in subject matter. These may be more benevolently autobiographical than any of her previous fictions. In "Hurricane Hazel” the Toronto hurricane of 1954 with its banal violence and destruction backgrounds the escape of the narrator from an adolescent love affair of equally banal proportions. The last story, “Unearthing Suite” fulfills the dedication of the book to Atwood’s parents, who appear as fictional versions of themselves in it. Maybe this is where she has learned some of the lessons of her writing, for here are most of the characteristic Atwood ideas. In particular, she defines the distinction between the spaces that men and women create and occupy, between the languages they separately use, and the understanding they make of the mysteries of the real world. At the end of the story, the family discovers a strange omen on the roof of their bush cabin. “For my father, this dropping is an interesting biological phenomenon. He has noted it and filed it, along with all the other scraps of fascinating data he notes and files. For my mother however, this is something else. For her this dropping. — this hand long, two-fingers-thlck, black, hairy dropping — not to put to fine a point on it, this deposit of animal shit — is a miraculous token, a sign of divine grace; as if their mundane, familiar, much-patched but at times still-leaking roof has been visited and made momentarily radiant by an unknown but by no means minor god.”

That is typical of the wonder in the ordinary which inhabits Atwood’s prose. What I wonder is why it has taken almost four years after its Canadian publication for this superb collection to be published in Britain and made available to the New Zealand market. The mass market paperback version has been available in North America for just on three years. Just over a year since the appearance here of the hardcover, too, appears the paperback edition of Atwood’s dystopian novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” her funny, chilling, and ultimately numbing rewriting of the Orwellian 1984 nightmare from a woman’s point of view. Atwood is promoting both of these titles in a tour of New Zealand and Australia.