The Books: “Bodily Harm” (Margaret Atwood)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Here is an excerpt from Bodily Harm – by Margaret Atwood. This is her fifth novel and seriously – this book FREAKED. ME. OUT. The only other person I knew who had read it was my friend Kate and we have had MANY conversations about it … it had the same effect on her as it did on me. Handmaid’s Tale is scary – but in a way this book is even scarier. I read this book years ago – and certain sections of it come back to me, nearly word for word. The opening of the book is spectacular. Unforgettable. It’s amazing I even kept reading after that.

She flips back and forth between points of view – as well as narrative voice. Sometimes Rennie speaks in an “I” voice … intermittently we will get long first-person monologues from her – and it’s not clear who she is speaking to … and when you realize, at the end of the book, what those monologues are about … and where she is when she says them … it’s like your mind just goes blank with horror. But the reveal doesn’t come until the end. Then there are far past sections – where we hear about Rennie’s childhood in a town called Griswold – and this is the first real indication of Atwood’s unbelievable BITCHINESS when it comes to certain aspects of Canadian culture. She is ruthless. This really comes to a head in Cat’s Eye – but Cat’s Eye is more humorous about it. Toronto’s pretensions, the self-righteous prudish populace beneath the “Oh, look at us being cosmopolitan now” …Atwood is Canadian, so she can get away with it. But in Bodily Harm, Atwood takes the gloves off. Griswold – Rennie’s hometown – is almost like another character in this book. A malignant evil small-minded character.

The book is not chronological. There are many different threads: Rennie is a “lifestyles” writer for a Toronto newspaper. Her life is spent writing stupid fluff pieces. She lives with a wolfish guy named Jake – who comes off as a total asshole – and Rennie somehow puts up with it. The book opens, though, after Jake has moved out. He moved out because Rennie had a breast removed, and he couldn’t deal with it. Rennie comes home one day, in the opening scene, her scar still pulling at her – and finds her door broken open – and there are two cops in her kitchen. And also – on her bed – is a coil of rope. This is a mystery that is never solved. The cops had heard of a break-in so they came over. Rennie stares at the coil of rope, mesmerized. The intruder had obviously been interrupted in whatever he had planned for her. But that sense of ominous doom hovers over the whole book. The intruder is out there. Somewhere. Always.

Rennie decides she needs to get away. She had fallen madly in love with the kindly doctor who did her surgery. But he was married … and she made a fool of herself. So she asks her editor if she can go away for a while – maybe do a fluff travel piece in the Caribbean or something. So off she goes to a little island in the Caribbean – not one of the touristy ones – this is more of a third world country. Her sense of dissociation continues – and basically, while she is there, a military coup occurs. She is slow to figure out what is going on – and slow to understand the danger she is in – as a Canadian (the Canadian government had supported the overthrown government, if I’m remembering correctly) … and she meets a couple of other people there – and it’s like she has been completely disconnected from her life before. Who is she now? Will she be able to return to normal? And not even to normal … will she be able to get off the island and get back to Canada?

Interspersed with all of this narrative (and the whole book goes back and forth between the different story lines – Rennie’s breast, her unrequited love of the doctor, her relationship with Jake, her career, her time on the island) are the long monologues – the long first-person monologues, where Rennie is talking (to whom??) about her upbringing, sharing memories, telling stories.

It’s a terrifying book – I’m making it sound very prosaic and normal – but there is horror here. On every level. I need to read it again.

I’m going to excerpt from one of the monologues. The last section – the last image of the grandmother – haunts me to this day.

Excerpt from Bodily Harm – by Margaret Atwood.

I grew up surrounded by old people: my grandfather and my grandmother, and my great-aunts and great-uncles, who came to visit after church. I thought of my mother as old too. She wasn’t, but being around them all the time made her seem old. On the street she walked slowly so they could keep up with her, she raised her voice the way they did, she was anxious about details. She wore clothes like theirs too, dark dresses with high collars and small innocuous patterns, dots or sprigs of flowers.

As a child I learned three things well: how to be quiet, what not to say, and how to look at things without touching them. When I think of that house I think of objects and silences. The silences are almost visible; I pictured them as grey, hanging in the air like smoke. I learned to listen for what wasn’t being said, because it was usually more important than what was. My grandmother was the best at silences. According to her, it was bad manners to ask direct questions.

The objects in the house were another form of silence. Clocks, vases, end-tables, cabinets, figurines, cruet sets, cranberry glasses, china plates. They were considered important because they had once belonged to someone else. They were both overpowering and frail: overpowering because threatening. What they threatened you with was their frailty; they were always on the verge of breaking. These objects had to be cleaned and polished once a week, by my grandmother when she was still well enough and afterwards by my mother. It was understood that you could never sell these objects or give them away. The only way you could ever get rid of them was to will them to someone else and then die.

The objects weren’t beautiful, most of them. They weren’t supposed to be. They were only supposed to be of the right kind: the standard aimed at was not beauty but decency. That was the word, too, among my mother and my aunts, when they came to visit. “Are you decent?” they would call gaily to one another before opening bedroom or bathroom doors. Decency was having your clothes on, in every way possible.

If you were a girl it was a lot safer to be decent than to be beautiful. If you were a boy, the question didn’t arise; the choice was whether or not you were a fool. Clothes could be decent or indecent. Mine were always decent, and they smelled decent too, a wool smell, mothballs and a hint of furniture polish. Other girls, from families considered shoddy and loose, wore questionable clothes and smelled like violets. The opposite of decent wasn’t beautiful, but flashy or cheap. Flashy, cheap people drank and smoked, and who knew what else? Everyone knew. In Griswold, everyone knew everything, sooner or later.

So you had your choice, you could decide whether people would respect you or not. It was harder if your family wasn’t respectable but it could be done. If your family was respectable, though, you could choose not to disgrace it. The best way to keep from disgracing it was to do nothing unusual.

The respectability of my family came from my grandfather, who had once been the doctor. Not a doctor, the doctor: they had territories then, like tomcats. In the stories my grandmother told me about him, he drove a cutter and team through blizzards to tear babies out through holes he cut in women’s stomachs and then sewed up again, he amputated a man’s leg with an ordinary saw, knocking the man out with his fist because no one could hold him down and there wasn’t enough whiskey, he risked his life by walking into a farmhouse where a man had gone crazy and was holding a shotgun on him the whole time, he’d blown the head off one of his children and was threatening to blow the heads off the other ones too. My grandmother blamed the wife, who had run away months before. My grandfather saved the lives of the remaining children, who were then put in an orphanage. No one wanted to adopt children who had such a crazy father and mother everyone knew such things ran in the blood. The man was sent to what they called the loony bin. When they were being formal they called it an institution.

My grandmother worshiped my grandfather, or so everyone said. When I was little I thought of him as a hero, and I guess he was, he was about the closest thing you could get in Griswold unless you’d been in the war. I wanted to be like him, but after a few years at school I forgot about that. Men were doctors, women were nurses; men were heroes, and what were women? Women rolled the bandages and that was about all anyone ever said about that.

The stories my mother and aunts told about my grandfather were different, though they never told these stories when my grandmother was there. They were mostly about his violent temper. When they were girls, whenever they skirted what he felt to be the edges of decency, he would threaten to horsewhip them, though he never did. He thought he was lenient because he didn’t make his children sit on a bench all Sunday as his own father had. I found it very difficult to connect these stories, or my grandmother’s either, with the frail old man who could not be disturbed during his afternoon nap and who had to be protected like the clocks and figurines. My mother and my grandmother tended him the same way they tended me, efficiently and with a lot of attention to dirt; only more cheerfully. Perhaps they really were cheerful. Perhaps it made them cheerful to have him under their control at last. They cried a lot at his funeral.

My grandmother had been amazing for a woman of her age; everyone told me that. But after my grandfather’s death she began to deteriorate. That’s how my mother would put it when her sisters would come to visit. They were both married, which was hot they’d got away from Griswold. I was in high school by then so I didn’t spend as much time hanging around the kitchen as I used to, but one day I walked in on them and all three of them were laughing, stifled breathless laughs, as if they were in a church or at a funeral: they knew they were being sacrilegious and they didn’t want my grandmother to hear them. They hardly saw me, they were so intent on their laughter.

She wouldn’t give me a key to the house, my mother said. Thought I’d lose it. This started them off again. Last week she finally let me have one, and I dropped it down the hot air register. They patted their eyes, exhausted as if they’d been running.

Foolishness, said my aunt from Winnipeg. This was my grandmother’s word for anything she didn’t approve of. I’d never seen my mother laugh like that before.

Don’t mind us, my aunt said to me.

You laugh or you cry, said my other aunt.

You laugh or you go bats, said my mother, injecting a little guilt, as she always did. This sobered them up. They knew that her life, her absence of a life, was permitting them their own.

After that my grandmother began to lose her sense of balance. She would climb up on chairs and stools to get things down, things that were too heavy for her, and then she would fall. She usually did this when my mother was out, and my mother would return to find her sprawled on the floor, surrounded by broken china.

Then her memory began to go. She would wander around the house at night, opening and shutting doors, trying tof ind her way back to her room. Sometimes she wouldn’t remember who she was or who we were. Once she frightened me badly by coming into the kitchen, in broad daylight, as I was making myself a peanut-butter sandwich after school.

My hands, she said. I’ve left them somewhere and now I can’t find them. She was holding her hands in the air, helplessly, as if she couldn’t move them.

They’re right there, I said. On the ends of your arms.

No, no, she said impatiently. Not those, those are no good any more. My other hands, the ones I had before, the ones I touch things with.