Cat's Eye (#113)

Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood

What I said then:

"A key work from the Grande Dame of Canadian Letters that I haven't got around to yet."

What I say now:

Margaret Atwood is a freakin' genius, she's one of my favourite novelists in the world, and Cat's Eye may, after a bit of reflection, be the best thing of hers that I've read yet (A Handmaid's Tale, a sci-fi examination of the politics of women's bodies, is the other contender, in case anybody's interested). I've mentioned before in this blog that I have a very short list of authors of whom I will, before I die, read their complete works. Cat's Eye puts Margaret Atwood on that list. It's that fucking good.

Elaine Risely, a successful painter, flies back to her hometown of Toronto to attend the opening of a retrospective of her work. The journey back to the city of her youth leads her to remember her childhood, adolescence and young adulthood, which were marked by a destructive and traumatic 'friendship' with a neighbourhood girl named Cordelia.

And that's the plot, in a nutshell, but that summary doesn't come near to doing justice to the richness of Atwood's creation. Elaine has (probably) the most complex interior life, and fully rounded personality, of any fictional character I've ever come across. Atwood has captured perfectly the way that our lives shape us, the way a seemingly unimportant experience as a kid can stick in the subconscious and loom over us years later, the way that the person we become is subtly hinted at in the person we were. Narrated in the first person, Cat's Eye could be mistaken for a memoir if only it wasn't so ... whole, so perfect.

Elaine is bullied as a kid and the first half of the book will be horribly recognisable to anyone who was ever a child - that is, to everyone. As a portrait of a childhood, the book is remarkable enough, but it doesn't rest on its laurels: as they grow up, the relationship between Elaine and Cordelia grows infinitely more complicated, and sends its tendrils through Elaine's entire life, gaining in power even as the two girls drift apart. When the relationship's (and the story's) resolution comes, it's not what Atwood and Elaine have been leading you to expect ... but it's more powerful for being unexpected.

There's also considerable technical skill on display: as Old Elaine narrates Young Elaine's life, the reader is presented with two levels of consciousness simultaneously, that of the young girl experiencing events, and the old woman remembering them. That should be difficult enough for a writer, but Atwood doesn't stop there, having Old Elaine unaware of the significance of many elements of her own story, only to finally understand her own life at the very end of the book. It really is an incredible feat of reader-juggling, made even more impressive by the fact I only realised how great it was once I'd finished the book: it's so seamless that, during the novel, I didn't notice a thing (Philip Roth does something similar in his equally good The Plot Against America).

Anyway, my 2011 has had its first great book. Huzzah! And sorry about the lack of a front-cover picture up top, blogspot's being skittish about uploading jpegs. I'll try again in a day or two.

Cheers, JC.


about to read: Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
books to go: 112