Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake ed. by J. Brooks Bouson (review)

In her introduction to Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake, J. Brooks Bouson highlights Atwood’s belief that a text is ‘“alive” if it cannot only “grow” but also “change” through its interactions with its readers.’ Bouson and the contributors to this collection demonstrate this very premise. The book is a recent addition to the Continuum Studies in Contemporary North American Fiction series, with each study featuring essays on novels published since 1990 by an established author. Gathering together an exceptional group of international scholars, Bouson makes the most of the Continuum series format. While each critic investigates a distinct component of one of the three novels (such as magic realism, narrative multiplicity, and moral/environmental debt), the collection, with its many points of intersection between the papers and across the sections, offers a lively exploration of new ground in Atwood scholarship, in effect revealing how texts truly grow and change in the hands of attentive, critical readers.

Bouson’s overview of the ‘flourishing Atwood industry’ outlines the author’s diverse roles as cultural commentator, feminist writer, environmental advocate, and innovator of literary forms. The salient point is Bouson’s discussion of Atwood’s ‘story-telling compulsion’ and the various storytelling characters who inhabit her fiction. These voices, including Atwood’s own (which Bouson suggests haunts the texts), along with the author’s experimentations with form have given her fiction its dynamism, range, and endurance.

The Continuum series is directed toward ‘advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students,’ and the careful framing at the beginning of each section and within the individual essays makes this a highly accessible volume. In one of the later pieces, Karen F. Stein opens with the comment, ‘Since defining a book’s genre provides a framework for interpretation, reviewers and critics often ask such a question.’ Herein lies one of the strengths of this collection: all contributors diligently contextualize their examinations of the novels, bringing to light Atwood’s inventive storytelling through the advantage of a wider perspective. Before readers delve into the close textual analyses, they find themselves consistently well-situated with respect to the history of specific genres and Atwood’s far-from-straightforward relationship with traditional narrative forms.

The first section features The Robber Bride and foundational aspects of Atwood’s writing, such as her proclivity for the gothic genre, dark doubles, and villainesses. The critical inventiveness lies in Sharon R. Wilson’s delineation of magic realism at work in this and other Atwood texts, Hilde Staels’s exploration of Zenia’s assumption of the trickster role, and Laurie Vickroy’s analysis of family and war-related trauma. Part 2 carries forward these important discussions through Fiona Tolan’s examination of sisterly relations, silencing, and female aggression in The Blind Assassin. Magali Cornier Michael and Shuli Barzilai return to Atwood’s storytelling strategies, the recurring topic that is central to this collection’s achievement. Michael’s analysis of narrative multiplicity and ‘low-brow’ genres situates Iris Chase as a self-empowering author. In a similar vein, Barzilai investigates how detective fiction and elegiac memoir intersect with Atwood’s use of photographic ekphrasis to expose narrative ambiguities. Finally, part 3 addresses Oryx and Crake through Atwood’s recent preoccupations with post-humanism, rampant consumerism, bioengineering, and environmental crisis. Shannon Hengen reads Payback as a companion text to the novel, arguing that Atwood draws upon the language of prophecy in order to counteract contemporary, technological society’s lack of moral principles. Much criticism exists regarding the Frankenstein story in Oryx and Crake, but Karen F. Stein provides one of the most detailed comparisons, illuminating differences between Mary Shelley’s tale of a lone scientist and Atwood’s reworking of it through Crake’s financial backing by profit-driven, all-powerful corporations. Mark Bosco, S.J., concludes the section through his tracing of the apocalyptic imagination and Atwood’s use of the Bildungsroman in conjunction...