“Where are you staying?” Tony asks politely, meaning, when are you leaving.
“Oh, you know,” says Zenia with a shrug. “Here and there. I live from hand to mouth – or from feast to famine. Just like the old days, remember, West? Remember our feasts?” She’s eating a Viennese chocolate, from a box West brought home to surprise Tony. He often brings her little treats, little atonements for the part of himself he’s unable to give her.
Their love is gentle and discreet. If it were a plant it would be a fern, light green and feathery and delicate; if a musical instrument, a flute. If a painting it would be a water lily by Monet, one of the more pastel renditions, with its liquid depths, its reflections, its different falls of light. “You’re my best friend,” West tells Tony, stroking her hair back from her forehead. “I owe you a lot.” Tony is touched by his gratitude, and too young to be suspicious of it.
Relationships, Power, and Longing
This is the second post in my new Book Review Series; hopefully you’re beginning to be able to see a pattern emerge. My sister Bel and I were talking about this recently: that when we read a book review, we don’t really care so much to know about the plot of the book, we want to get a sense of what the writing is like, what ideas and themes the book touches upon. If I pick a book up, of course I will read the blurb, but very rarely will this be enough to persuade me to buy it. I need to be able to leaf through, to get a sense of the writing, the words. This is what I hope to convey with the book review format I’ve adopted: not a summary of what happens, but an excerpt, a couple of passages, a few paragraphs about the underlying themes, to show you what to expect. A book is a physical pleasure for me too: the cover, the colour of the pages, hence my choice to include them here.
I feel that I should start by saying that I am not well acquainted with Margaret Atwood. I have never studied English language literature, so any books I read in English I approach simply from the perspective of a reader, not that of a student. I know that she has a career that spans decades, I imagine that her work therefore covers a range of styles and themes. The only other two of her books that I have read are The Handmaid’s Tale and The Blind Assassin. I don’t remember caring all that much for the former. I was entertained by and enjoyed the latter, enough to prompt me to deliberately seek out some of her other works (and thus in part the reason I came across The Robber Bride), but I was disappointed in its language – I think I sensed that here was a writer who could write beautifully, and perhaps that a deliberate choice had been made in this case not to do so.
The Robber Bride is beautifully written. It is exactly my favourite kind of writing in this respect: evocative, thought provoking, playful. It builds atmosphere easily, cleverly, then twists it suddenly into the deeply personal: an offhand comment, a one-line statement that say: is this not the case? Don’t you know this to be true? Alongside this, run several musings on different themes. What is history? What is power? What is love? The plot is not about what will happen (spoiler: the clue is in the title), but how. The delight is in guessing then watching it happen, thinking about the ways in which you guessed wrong, and wondering why. I take pleasure in capturing a record of thought-arresting passages when I read by turning the corners of the pages down: you can see below how many times I did this.
The book has four stories, those of Tony, Roz and Charis, each intertwined with that of Zenia. Tony, Roz and Charis teeter constantly, gleefully, you sense, on the verge of parody, but somehow retain just enough depth to keep you interested. I imagine that if you value plot in itself, this would not necessarily be a book that appeals to you. Even if you’re here for the writing per se, the ending could come as somewhat of a disappointment. But then again it ties into the underlying themes, it was enough for me.
I picked The Robber Bride up a few months ago; the past few months have been busy, stressful, dark days of winter, here in Auckland. It was the perfect read for me during this time, something that had the power to take me instantly out of my day to day, something that was entertaining and stimulating without requiring deep concentration, something that gives generously and asks little in return. I loved it. Go read it.
Mad to Live 