Surfacing

"We both wait for my answer."

Atwood's second novel opens with a powerful 1st person voice, an unnamed unreliable narrator walking into ominous isolation. She is on her way from Toronto to a fishing trip in Quebec with her quiet bearded boyfriend and a married couple, David and Anna. David has a Woodie-Woodpecker laugh.

We slowly learn her oddities, and her relationship to the island home they are staying on. Her father owns the island. He's not wealthy, but it's small island and he's an obsessed naturalist searching for something. And he recently disappeared. So, the two couples are staying in her own childhood home, with reminders of her deceased mother and childhood, while knowing her father may be around somewhere, living or as a show more corpse.

Relationship strains, sex, and isolation warp the background texture of her response and relationship to this place and to her missing father. She is searching for him, but discretely and in more convoluted ways. Meanwhile she becomes emotionally isolated, and flat. All the while David, clearly aware of feminist trends but emotionally abusive to his wife, gets wilder. Is she suffering grief? Is she sane?

I liked the voice, read well enough in my audio edition, but I’m mixed on the book. It's interesting in light of who Atwood was then, and how she was developing as a writer. It has a lot of autobiographical references, the father like her father, the narrator a lot like Atwood herself, cosmopolitan but comfortable in nature, soon to get divorced, and also who didn't drive. But the book felt undercooked to me. I thought the narrator's "voice" was strained by doing other book-practical things, like building the book's setting, which just needed information. The odd logic in the narrator's mind, an illogic, albeit given she had a loosening tie to normal sanity, was still very hard for me. I think Atwood was doing at least four things at once: making social commentary, searching an inner life when in a kind of state of grief, and getting the reader in touch with nature, and creating an unreliable narrator.

I'm going too long, but I want to add that I couldn't help thinking of different ways how Atwood could have used this voice. It's striking but loses something in needing to convey everything. I like to think that if Atwood had written the book as a standard 3rd person narrative, and then inserted narrator's voice in places, the same voice would have lit up page, heightened by the contrast. This is just me thinking out loud.

Recommended for Atwood completists and those who can't resist an unreliable narrator. show less

A jagged work entered into awkwardly. Thankfully it gracefully unfurls into a masterful mysticism, allowing those strained moments of trauma that suddenly erupt within the prose to be steadily calmed and reintegrated into the spirit.

I was introduced to this work in Mark Fisher’s essay Inside Out: Outside In: which is a piece of writing I couldn’t recommend highly enough, he situates this book nicely in the fin-de-Sixties tradition of wishing to push outside the Symbolic Order to where only the dead belong. The father is lost in the woods, the tree cancer is approaching, and the man talking about American Pigs and free love is nothing but a mere husk who would rather treat sex as two detached appendages flying spasmodically into one show more another. Order is created by knives, Hitler can no longer be the measure of Evil, and the metallic American neoliberal ideal is slashing the psyche with its self-righteous, pedagogic claws. Where to go but to these leering woods that promise a language without words? To a primordial state of being that endows one with an immediate identity that multiplies yet sticks? To the bottom of the lake where essential truths lay concealed under jellyfish and refuse? Toward a personal god that proffers an indifferent absence one can subsist within?

Just do yourself a favour and read it. You won’t like it at first but you’ll soon be hooked, like a frog in a jar. show less

Atwood’s first published novel sees her get off to a good start with this eerie tale of a woman returning to her childhood home in the Canadian wilderness in search of her lost father.

There’s a foreboding right from the very start of the novel as the prose keeps you very much captive inside the thoughts of the protagonist. And she’s a broody sort who becomes increasingly paranoid as the novel progresses. It does not end well for her. Or, perhaps it does. Hard to say.

What you can be sure of is that there’s an awful lot going on here in so short a book. As an experienced Atwood reader, I can see how all the elements that would make her later novels shine are there, buried in the dust of her early years as a novelist.

The novel’s show more central theme is identity, particularly identity formed by places and experiences in them as a child. The landscape itself is detached from the people who enter it at the start of the story. By the end, it has taken over. I couldn’t help thinking that this would make a good film. I think Meryl Streep or, if she’s busy, perhaps Kate Winslet could pull off the main character.

Well worth a read and a good, short introduction to Atwood. show less

The first person narrator, who never tells us her name, leaves "the city" to return to the isolated French Canadian countryside where she grew up to see if she can find her father, who has disappeared into the bush. With her are friends David and Anna, who she hasn't known very long, but who have a car and agreed to take her where she needs to go; and Joe, her current lover (apparently one of a fairly long string--she refers to him as "this one"), a hirsute man of very few words. As you might expect, this is a journey of discovery for the narrator as she revisits old haunts, seeks out places her father might have gone searching for ancient native paintings, learns unpleasant things about the couple she had viewed as happily married, and show more wrestles with her own past. Early on it's clear she had been hiding things from her parents; soon we wonder what she's hiding from us, and even from herself. As time passes, she pushes civilization further and further from herself, along with rational thought, until we glimpse an almost feral creature desperate to dissolve into the natural world. There are some brutal images and abundant symbolism in this powerful work. Atwood's characters are brilliantly drawn; David, a self-absorbed jackass who punctuates his conversation with cartoon character laughs, simply made my skin crawl; Anna, a woman terrified of losing her husband, obnoxious as he is, who contrives never to let him see her without make-up, made me want to introduce her to some real people, male and female; Joe, a cipher, really, who is not up to understanding his lover, but tries his best, might be the most sympathetic of the lot. My one quibble with this novel is that I found the ending a bit unsatisfactory. I thought we were going to end up in one place, and apparently we did not, although I feel we should have. (Yes, I know that's clear as mud...sorry, but I can't do better without being terribly spoilerish.)
Review written in April 2016 show less

I was prepared to dash through this short novel but quickly realized I ought to slow down, then slower still, one chapter per day. It is tightly woven like a short story, without the extraneous bits, full of great descriptions ('cow-sprinkled hills ... cuttings dynamited in pink and grey granite'). I'm more familiar with Ontario than Quebec, but I know this backcountry with its lakes and mist, its quiet woods and islands. Atwood fully convinces me that she knows it too.

There are two mysteries in play, the surface action and also a deeper psychological story. A woman's father who lives alone in his island cottage goes mysteriously missing. After being notified, she rounds up her boyfriend and some friends to transport her, so she can show more look for clues. At the same time, the reader is left to wonder why she's bothering. She displays no particular attachment to her father in her first-person narrative - nor to her boyfriend, or to her shallow friends, nor is she triggered by nostalgia during this trip back to her childhood stomping grounds (it was never her home, she keeps telling us.) She isn't attached to anything, or anyone. References to drowning creep in, to being underwater.

I'm of two minds about stories that delve into different realms of logic where I can't follow, but there's something satisfying in how it's managed here. Before you can surface you must first submerge, to the only place where you can find the answers you seek. show less

Atwood wrote this book in 1971 probably (since it was first published in 1972) at which time I was slogging my way through first year university. And I have to confess that it was quite some time before I started reading her writing. The first book that made an impact on me was The Handmaid's Tale which was published in 1985. I've read almost everything she has written since then and read quite a few of the earlier novels. Somehow this one always escaped my attention. When I ran out of reading material on a camping trip and had to find something else to read from the fabulous USB Poor Michael's in Onanole MB, this seemed like the time to remedy that void. Turns out to be quite appropriate to read it while communing with nature right show more before Canada Day.

A woman (who remains unnamed throughout the book) makes a trip from the city to the remote Quebec lake where she spent her youth. With her is her boyfriend Joe and a married couple, David and Anna. She is back to search for her father, a naturalist who has been living in a cabin on an island. Paul, a friend of his, found the cabin uninhabited and unlocked and wrote to the daughter. While she searches for her father she also undergoes a psychological journey. Her companions are not very helpful in either quest. David is more concerned with the American encroachment on Canada; Anna is desperately trying to retain a youthful appearance so David will continue to stay with her; Joe, well Joe is a man of few words so it is hard to say what he is thinking but he does ask our heroine to marry him so probably he is thinking about that. When the news comes that the father's body has been found in the lake by some American fisherman our heroine has a psychological meltdown. After a few days of wandering in the woods with only a blanket for covering and no food she vanquishes the demons (which she calls gods) and prepares to return to civilization.

This latter period seems so much like a vision quest on which native peoples engage. There are other references to native spirituality and lifestyle. We hear about these things often now but, as far as I can remember, in the early 1970s these would have been extremely uncommon. That's just one example of how long Atwood has been exploring themes she has developed over the years. Concern for the environment and animal welfare are also referenced; again, these were not high in the public consciousness.

This will never be my favourite Atwood but it is interesting in terms of seeing how early she was writing about themes which she has continued to explore throughout her long writing career. show less

I can see why people find this book challenging but I loved it. It felt authentic and was so compelling even as the narrator devolves into an animal state. I felt a visceral disgust for the men she is around in the book which made me ready for the ending that others found unexpected. A challenging, unusual read, but well worth the time. Another great Atwood.