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FICTION I 343 FICTION Of the fiction published in 1976 by established writers none is of the obvious stature of such recent important Canadian novels as Robertson Davies' Fifth Business, Mordecai Richler's St. Urbain's Horseman, or Margaret Laurence's The Diviners. Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle, Marian Engel's Bear, Brian Moore's The Doctor's Wife, Richard Wright's Farthing 's Fortunes, and Hugh Hood's collection of short stories, Dark Glasses, strike me as being the most interesting work published during a very lean year. Yet even among these five books only two, Hood's and Wright's, are in any fully critical sense'memorable, while the others are notable primarily for other reasons: each is worth noting because of what it indicates about the progress of a significant creative career. I also believe that two of the novels, Lady Oracle and Bear, were vastly overpraised upon publication, and that it is worthwhile to examine both in order to try to understand why they evoked such a response, and to indicate why it was undeserved. Lady Oracle (McClelland and Stewart, 345, $10.00) was probably the most widely talked about novel of the year. Given Atwood's stature within the Canadian cultural community, such attention is completely justified and will probably be repeated with the appearance of each succeeding work. I suspect one of the reasons for the popularity of Lady Oracle lies in the fact that the novel restates in a more attractive and accessible form -light comedy - the themes and situations of Atwood's earlier poetry and fiction. Joan Foster, the novel's heroine, recapitulates within her own life at least two of the central concerns of Atwood's corpus: the woman's search for her real, often unconscious, self, and her resistance to a male's attempt to shape her. At the novel's opening she is hiding in Terremoto, Italy, where she has gone after faking a suicide in Toronto Harbour. From this point on the novel develops on three levels of time: the immediate present, flashbacks into Joan's past, and the timeless excerpts from Joan's latest 'costume gothic' romance which neatly function as an indirect commentary on her own life. Structurally this is both the most ambitious and easily the most successful of Atwood's novels. It moves smoothly between Terremoto, Joan's memories of an obese childhood, her life in London as the mistress of a Polish Count who writes 'nurse' novels, and her involvement with her husband Arthur Foster and his political friends in Toronto. Throughout these various periods of her life Joan is always aware that she is not the person others want or think her to be. While her mother dreams of a daughter who will resemble Joan Crawford, Joan 344 LETTERS IN CANADA 1976 dreams of being the fat lady in pink tights at the circus; while Arthur sees her as a non-intellectual, uncreative, and apolitical woman, Joan writes gothic romances and a best-selling book of poems, 'Lady Oracle.' The irreconcilable tensions between self and others, self and persona, finally drive the bungling joan to her 'suicide.' Yet at the novel's end she prepares to return to Toronto, and, like the heroine of Surfacing, to confront the complex reality of her personal life from which ultimate escape is impossible. The comparison to Surfacing, whose ending seems to be parodied in the penultimate chapter, is partially misleading, however, because Lady Oracle is an attempt at a consistently comic mode of fiction. The bumbling and usually silly heroine is the focus for a variety of absurd misadventures some of which, including the ending in which she clubs a reporter with a bottle of Cinzano, verge on slapstick. Unfortunately too much of the novel's humour is the product of fairly predictable stock situations. The same is true of Atwood's rather weak satire on various aspects of Toronto life. (It is worth noting in passing that in both Surfacing and Lady Oracle Atwood has satirized characters whose political orientation - her orientation -is nationalistic without offering the reader a positive political or ideological alternative.) The novel fails, however, not just because Atwood's humour...

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