Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood

Review by Red Bonney

Margaret Atwood is a Goddess of Canadian Literature. She should be revered so. Despite these frank and somewhat obsequious adulations, I am not employed in the Margaret Atwood fanclub (but I would if they’d hire me).

This book struck me almost immediately as a great novel. I picked it up at the bookstore because I have an addiction to buying books and the bookcover and title attracted my eye that particular day. For a long time, it sat on my shelf because that’s what happens to the majority of books I buy on impulse. When I finally got around to cracking the cover to read the thing, I couldn’t believe that it had been written when I was two(-ish). It is the mark of a readable (and re-readable) book that can be read in any era without immediately being reminded of ghastly orange plaid slacks. What I am trying to say is, the characters were like real people, the places are real places and the plot is as exciting and mundane as real life.

The story opens with the heroine, Joan Foster, a famous and easily identifiable personage, hiding in a small village in Italy. She has just completed a stunt wherein she left Canada and her husband believing that she had died in a boating accident. Naturally the reader is left to think up all kinds of nasty rumour and innuendo about this husband. Why did she leave him in so dramatic a method? What did he do to deserve such treatment? What sort of shenanigans did she get up to that she thought this was a good and proper solution to her problems?

None of these questions are answered until much further on in the book. Because next, we go on a history lesson of Joan’s childhood, as traumatic and disastrous as anyone can claim. Her parents, though they (eventually) live in the same house, were essentially estranged. And strange. Her mother was a controlling perfectionist and forever complaining about Joan to Joan; her father was somewhat detached from the world and his family; and neither parent did much to make life any easier for their only daughter.

The story winds along with snippets of ‘present day’ Joan added in, in which she is trying to write a novel in order to make some money to facilitate her new life as Someone Else, and eventually meets up with this present day (which is actually some time in the late sixties or early seventies I think). It was like reading three books at once: The Past life of Joan, where she is an overweight, awkward kid trying to fit herself into the world that seems to want nothing to do with her. The Present Joan, a fugitive on the run pretending to be her other persona in order to fix whatever went wrong. And the novel inside the novel. Joan’s novel was mirroring her own experiences. She had to find the correct ending to her own story in order to finish the book. But then, life happens and everything goes wrong. Again.

Such is life.