Margaret Atwood: Crime Fiction Writer: The Reworking of a Popular Genre by Jackie Shead (review)

‘At the bottom of each Atwoodian plot lies a mystery, often in the shape of a corpse’ (p. 14). Atwood’s novels are littered with dead bodies – murder victims, suicides, accidental deaths, together with political assassinations, even a pandemic which destroys most of the world’s population. In this detailed critical study of Atwood’s crime writing, Shead analyses Atwood’s narrative artifice and her reasons for revisiting this popular genre. Most opportunely, this book coincides with Atwood’s marked shift of interest to genre fiction with The Stone Mattress and The Heart Goes Last, and Shead focuses on how to read these revamped versions of classic crime subgenres like the murder mystery and the spy thriller. Drawing on crime fiction theory, feminism, and postcolonialism, she stresses the art of interpretation, noting how Atwood constructs her novels in such a way as to turn her readers into detectives. Not only must we piece together the plot, but in the process we might become more aware of fiction-making and of our own ways of making sense of the world. Shead draws attention to the ethical dimensions of Atwood’s fiction. When a narrator says, ‘I have designs on you’ (‘Murder in the Dark’), the slightly jokey threat leaps out of the crime genre to become a declaration of moral seriousness, though being Atwood, that is cannily masked by wit and humour (and I confess that I would have liked to find a bit more of that in this book).

The first chapter begins with a short history of crime fiction, before arguing that Atwood’s understanding of crime is different: ‘in the process of uncovering and exorcising particular traumatic and transgressive acts, wider, socially embedded crimes are revealed’ (p. 16). This interpretation relates directly to her feminist and human rights concerns, and in chapters 2 to 5 Shead offers forensic analyses of Surfacing, Bodily Harm, Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin, tracing Atwood’s increasingly complex refigurings of crime fiction’s tropes and plots. Whereas Surfacing combines detective mystery with ghost story, and Bodily Harm plays off spy thriller against murder mystery and romance, the two later novels are far more intricately structured as postmodern detective fictions. As reader- detectives we are encouraged to see through the omissions and lies of her duplicitous female storytellers in our efforts towards interpretation, though some crucial questions remain unanswered: Was Grace Marks guilty of murder? Who is the Blind Assassin? As Shead argues persuasively, Atwood is not so interested in these generic crimes, preferring to expose the broader crimes of a patriarchal and class-divided society; she also offers an excellent analysis of Atwood’s subversive rewriting of English Canadian history. Chapter 6 on Payback, Oryx and Crake and selected recent stories is rather a miscellany which looks like a supplement to the main argument, though the last two chapters on the metafictive detective story and postcolonial crime fiction recontextualise Atwood’s innovations within the genre. Shead’s timely study is a fine example of the critic as sleuth, activating our awareness of the author’s craft and her renewed interest in popular fiction.