Three little maids from school
Anita Brookner
THE ROBBER BRIDE by Margaret Atwood Bloomsbury, £15.99, pp. 470 Margaret Atwood is unusual among feminist writers in that she holds the view — and propounds it with some vigour that women can be as wicked as men, and in addition that they can direct that wickedness at each other. This was the bur- den of her excellent novel Cat's Eye, and the theme is revived in The Robber Bride. The trouble is that this idea is beginning to rejoin much older and more cliched novels in which the mouselike girl triumphs over the flame-haired temptress, much rel- ished by schoolgirls of all ages. 'Schoolgirls' is unfortunately the word which comes to mind for Atwood's three protagonists. There is Roz, the rich one, Charis, the daft New Age one, and Tony, the elfin academ- ic and wise woman of the three. All have been done down and had their men stolen by Zenia, an old university chum who assumes various menacing or pathetic guises, is an expert fabulist, and can even rise from the dead, or so it seems. While postulating solidarity among the three dis- possessed survivors, Margaret Atwood is clearly energised by the figure of Zenia, whose awfulness is spelt out and charac- terised by her most zestful prose. This prose however has departed from the high standard we have come to expect from Canadian writers and has been exchanged for zippy down-market American:
Roz made it through high school, which was not exactly an abode of bliss, understatement of the year.
The result, with its brutal swagger and bitchy revelations, is wickedly readable.
But what of the story? We are practically on Fay Weldon territory here. The three women are easily duped and are without resource, which was fairly common in the 1950s, when the women were brought together, but is a concept less easily accept- able today. The idea worked better when applied to the children of Cat's Eye, for children are authentically powerless, whereas grown women can theoretically confront their persecutors, or, better still, walk away. My argument with this novel is that Margaret Atwood is not an unreliable narrator: on the contrary, she is reporting from a battlefield on which the vanquished were always indifferently armed. Her animus is directed against the despoiler, the dirty fighter, the treacherous friend; treachery, or the prospect of treachery, is what holds her to her task and sharpens her pen. And that pen is very sharp indeed.
How Roz, Charis and Tony came to be so despoiled needs some explanation. Mar- garet Atwood takes great pains to unveil their childhood patterns, all of which are unfortunate or irregular or both. Destiny is therefore not biology; destiny is history. Or as Charis might say, destiny is destiny.
Indifferently mothered, abandoned, abused, all have made it through to some sort of equilibrium, and some sort of finan- cial comfort. Tony has even recovered her man, although he is not much of a prize: indeed all the men are eminently discard- able. So intense is the account of these women's misfortune that the main charac- ter, Zenia, is somewhat overshadowed, although anyone who has encountered a Zenia in real life will experience a genuine thrill of fear at meeting her again, even in fiction. Those reversals of fortune so gal- lantly shouldered, those hints at terminal illness, that sudden crucial need for money. . . It is all too plausible. Tony, Charis and Roz nervelessly hand over whatever they hold most dear. Therefore the prospect of once again meeting Zenia, whose funeral they have attended, is so awful that they can hardly acknowledge the fact that she has reappeared, more respon- dent than ever, in the Toxique restaurant, where all three of them are lunching, as they usually do, once a month.
This particular fatal woman makes only brief appearances, as if she were a genie too baleful to be let out of the bottle. Here the reviewer draws a veil and lets Margaret Atwood get on with it. This splendid, ner- vous book is not quite a comedy, not even a tragedy. It is an old-fashioned morality tale for women, from which men might derive a scarcely flattering message. But if the message passes them by one should hardly be surprised. We are in a world of women here, and female stratagems are remorselessly described. Yet that original impression of powerlessness remains. Para- doxically enough it is an extremely potent image, and one which the author manipu- lates with skill. Odd to think of so strong- minded a writer transfixed by so disabling a condition.
As Le Corbusier said, "A house is a machine for living in." '
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