Brutal Choreographies: Oppositional Strategies and Narrative Design in the Novels of Margaret Atwood by J. Brooks Bouson (review)

216 LEITERS IN CANADA 1992 text, features (among others) Christie's tales, Jules's tales, and Morag's life experiences; Morag learns to accept all versions of events as valid and valuable as she retells and reinterprets the stories. In 'Diviners All' Warwick notes that Morag is not the only diviner - hence the novel's plural title; perhaps all characters and all humanity are diviners. The point, however, remains speculative, for Warwick develops only the obvious characters; when she turns to Brooke she does not manage to link him with 'Diviners All.' The final section develops the connection between place and character development and also notes the patterns of imagery associated with both houses and the natural world. Houses serve as reflections of cultural traditions and social attitudes: Christie's house is associated with poverty and exclusion; Morag's log house is a sanctuary and a link with nature, the past, and other people (past and present). Warwick concludes with the river that flows two ways. Arguably the most important natural image, it opens and closes the book; it establishes and reiterates all central concerns: the inevitability of passing time and change, the interconnectedness and mutability of all moments in time, the importance of the natural world, the problem of rendering experience into language. Much contemporary criticism is elitist, exclusionary, filled with unnecessary jargon, but even when the language is simplified, and the book is shortened, it remains difficult to simplify complex critical interpretations. Given the cOlnplexity of Laurence's writing as well as the dozens of possible interpretations, it is impossible to give a complete overview of any novel in eighty pages. What we are left with is a short, often useful and interesting, but limited discussion of some aspects of the novels. ECW stresses the critical content of the Canadian Fiction Studies series; reading a text in the series is not a substitute for reading the noveL But readers should also be aware that neither are the texts substitutes for reading the larger body of criticism. (ELIZABETH THOMPSON) J. Brooks Bouson. Brutal Choreographies: Oppositional Strategies and Narrative Design in tlte Novels of Margaret Atwood University of Massachusetts Press. 204. $27.50 This book accomplishes what it sets out to do - that is, to work through each of Atwood's novels chronologically, from The Edible Woman (1969) through Cat's Eye (1988), foregrounding her tendency to 'provoke her readers to confront issues that are of special importance to women.' Reading these novels through the twin lenses of feminist theory and psychoanalysis, Bouson recognizes and defends Atwood's 'brutality' - her reliance on plots involving unsettling levels of violence, deceit, punitiveness , and dreams of revenge - as 'strategic' on Atwood's part, as repre- HUMANITIES 217 senting her attempt to oppose and, in fact, 'sabotage' romance plots and lather traditional forms and fonnulas' which endorse female submissiveness . Moreover, despite her insistence on portraying what she herself calls 'the disaster that is the world,' Atwood can be seen to deter readerly despair, says Bouson, through her careful 'choreography' (alluding to Atwood's 'preoccupation with form and design'). That is, behind the 'brutalities' that each of her novels records, the discerning reader of Margaret Atwood's fiction will intuit a cool, controlling, reassuring authorial presence - whose orderly management of the narrative can be read as countering the cultural disorder that the stories themselves embody. There is much that is useful in this solid, thoroughly researched study. The Edible Woman, Surfacing, and Lady Oracle are seen as early, straightforward feminist texts. Each resists patriarchal prescriptions with respect to marriage and the idea of romance. Life before Man and Bodily Harm are more bleak as their focus broadens to include glimpses of terrifying levels of brutality in the world at large and a widespread cultural anomie in reaction to it. The Handmaid's Tale and Cat's Eye represent a shift as they respond to the anti-feminist backlash of the 1980s and its attendant polarizations! the former challenging the 'antifeminist messages of the fundamentalist New Righe and the latter contradicting a Jfeminist ideology that idealizes female relationships' while insisting nonetheless upon the existence of female-to-female psychic brutality as a consequence of 'the methods...