This story focuses on Elaine Risley, a painter who, at the beginning of the story, returns to Toronto for a retrospective show of her art. This retrospective brings up issues from her past, most notably a relationship with several girls in her childhood.
This is one of my favorite books by Margaret Atwood, and one which I have read several times. Like some of her other books, the story focuses on women and their relationships with other women. The storyline here moves back and forth in time, so we have Elaine's current-day perspective on her life, but then she'll go back in time to take the reader through her childhood.
One of the things I have always especially liked in this book is that there is a mix of emotions in the story. There is some wry humor, and some sadder parts, and it all feels very realistic. I find that her characters resonate with me, and combined with the author's beautiful writing, it's easy to get caught up in the story. I like how Elaine reflects on her childhood, but especially focuses on one girl, Cordelia. In the beginning, their relationship is skewed in one direction, but later, when they encounter each other again, in high school, the relationship skews the other way. The focusing, and then re-focusing on this relationship, is interesting.
Elaine says, in the third paragraph of this book, "But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another. You don't look back along time but down through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away." This story is very much like that, where things in Elaine's past come back up to the surface. How she interprets those events and people comes through in her art.
Atwood's descriptions of Elaine's paintings are some of my favorite parts of this book. By now, after having read this book many times, I can see some of them quite clearly in my head (even though these paintings do not actually exist at all in the real world). For example, the painting "Our Lady of Perpetual Help," where Mary is seen trudging on a winter's night, with bags of groceries. Or, Elaine's painting of two men (former lovers of hers) who are painting a seated woman; one man's canvas looks like an idealized woman, and the other man's canvas is filled with swirls of color . . . and the seated woman, draped, has a head that is a sphere of bluish glass.
Atwood's observations of women relating to each other, especially at different times in their lives, makes this an interesting, introspective kind of story. Personally, I like to re-read this book, then The Robber Bride, and then The Handmaid's Tale and enjoy all three together.
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