Surfacing

Surfacing is a difficult book to love.  I’ve grown accustomed to Margaret Atwood’s later stuff and her later style.  I haven’t actually read much of her earlier work and this (being only her second novel) certainly falls into that category.  It feels like an early book too- less formed then something like Cat’s Eye (and a lot shorter) but still well worth the read.  This is a strange novel.  From the outset you seem to know where it’s going but all of a sudden the clear narrative driving force (the question of what happened to the narrator’s father) that you’ve followed disappears like a will-o’-the-wisp and you find that you’re left standing alone on uncertain ground.

It tells a fragmented story of an unnamed woman returning to a remote island in Quebec following the disappearance of her estranged father.  Very little is really resolved, instead what emerges is a disjointed account of isolation and infidelity and an inability to love.  Our narrator does not return to her childhood home alone; she brings with her married couple friends Anna and David and her partner, Joe.  These three are city dwellers and so are pretty much unable to look after themselves in a place with no electricity or indoor plumbing.  According, the narrator quickly assumes responsibility for them, leading to a downward spiral.  She cracks under the pressures of womanhood.  She is a divorcee who has left her child with ex-husband, having never really felt attached to it- the whole familial responsibility thing, it’s fair to say, isn’t her bag.  Having cracked under the pressure of it all, she eventually runs wild returning to the childhood haven of nature; falling back onto the information she was taught when young.

There’s feminism in Surfacing too; I get the feeling there always is with Atwood.  I’m not sure how effective it is in this book though.  Yes, the narrator has a breakdown because of her experiences as a woman, but at the start of the book she’s already abandoned a child that she felt so disconnected from that she refused to acknowledge it as her own.  She does not use gender pronouns in relation to this child; it is a removed and abstract thing.  Her whole attitude to the child is couched in language that makes her sound deluded, or at least suffering from some form of mental disorder.  As a result, the pressures put on her are called into question and her breakdown becomes less about her femininity and more about her mind.  The points where the feminism is strongest is when it doesn’t apply to the narrator; incidental things like Anna mentioning that her husband’s potential fury and abuse because she forgot her make-up on an overnight camping trip, or the descriptions of religious oppression and restrictions on women’s outfits in the nearby town.

There are moments in this book that really remind me of Cat’s Eye; things that I think Atwood returned to and developed further in her later novel.  Both the narrator of Surfacing and Elaine in Cat’s Eye grow up with nature due to their father’s professions and the way they are forced to abandon nature is remarkably similar.  As the girls start school and beginning socialising with other children their age both go against their family’s wishes and get involved in the church, due to curiosity and a need to fit in more than any strong religious leaning.  Naturally, for both, the religiosity is short lived.  I always like it in books when you can see the evolution of an author or a return to previous ideas.  It gives a sense of development and flow and it reinforces the fact that art isn’t created in a vacuum.

I don’t think I’ve summed up just why Surfacing is difficult to love, I’ve gotten distracted by feminism.  This seems to happen a lot.  It happens in life too.  It’s hard because nothing is clear.  It is not just the case that the narrator is mad and so her perception of the ills of the world and the treatment of women invalid.  Whenever women describe their oppression it sounds a tad insane, but the main instance of potential male insanity has a logical explanation.  Also, we never really do find out what happened to her father, which is really irksome.

My next read is a return to Iris Murdoch with The Nice and The Good.