Looking Beneath the Surfaces

Bodily Harm, by Margaret Atwood. Simon & Shuster, 1982.

By Pat Randle

Bodily Harm, Margaret Atwood's latest novel, is the story of a woman's odyssey and her eventual triumph over the odds. The book is a triumph for its author as well, a well-crafted novel.graced with clear, economical prose.

Rennie Wilford, the protagonist, a freelance journalist in Toronto who started writing about politics but soon moved on to "lifestyles," comes home one day to find two policemen in her kitchen and a rope neatly coiled on her bedspread. Rennie has been jolted by a series of personal crises: a partial mastectomy, the desertion of a lover in the wake of their shared inability to deal with the aftermath of the surgery, and an affair with her doctor. The final incident, the rope left on her bed by an unknown intruder, proves too much for Rennie. She wants to clear out of town to someplace warm and faraway, where she can relax and recuperate. She arranges to write a travel piece on the out-of-the-way Caribbean island of St. Antoine.

It's clear from the start that St. Antoine is not the hideaway Rennie had in mind, although she does her best to avoid the fact. On the plane, she meets the odd Dr. Minnow, former Minister of Tourism on St. Antoine, whose habits seem offbeat and incomprehensible. On the island, Rennie sees signs and graffiti proclaiming "Prince of Peace" and "The Fish Lives," signs she writes off as some sort of religious fanaticism. She's befriended by Paul, an adventurer who runs charter boats, and Lora, a woman who seems to know everyone but fixes on Rennie for company. Rennie senses that Paul may not be quite what he says he is, and that Lora might not either. However, she refuses to look beneath the surface.

Flashbacks reveal that reading surfaces is Rennie's stock in trade. She amuses her friends by being able to discern, from a glance at an individual's clothing and hairstyle, just who the person is and what kind of life the person leads. It's Rennie's business, quite literally, to know about that sort of thing. She writes about drain chain jewelry and the latest new wave styles. Rennie has a talent for surfaces.

But St. Antoine is not Toronto, and a talent for surfaces is of little use in a place where subterfuge is the common language. The signs, she finds out, refer not to religion, but to political candidates running in the island's election. The "Prince of Peace" is not Jesus, but Prince, a charismatic leftist leader. "The Fish" is Rennie's friend from the plane, Dr. Minnow. Paul may be a drug runner, as he confesses; he may be CIA or something else altogether. Lora asks Rennie to pick up a package at the airport, telling Rennie that the package contains drugs for an ill woman. Instead, Rennie discovers, the package contains a small submachine gun. The assumptions that Rennie used in Canada, that people are what they appear to be, simply are not operable in St. Antoine.

As elections near and Rennie feels more and more 'disoriented, she finds that someone has broken into her room and found, but not taken, the gun. She decides to deliver the box and get rid of her obligation. With Lora, she sets out for the nearby island of Ste. Agathe. On the smaller island, Rennie finds that signs of stress are more evident. Things are indeed falling apart, and at a frightening rate.

Unable to find refuge at the one hotel on Ste. Agathe, Rennie accepts an offer from Paul to stay at his small house. They await the election, returns. + Page 42/What She

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When the results come out, Ellis, the current leader on the island, has won seven seats. Minnow has won six and Prince two, so a meeting to strike an alliance between Minnow and Prince is called and goes on in Paul's living room. Rennie refuses to feel threatened. After all, she is an outsider, a foreigner. She's a journalist who writes about lifestyles, not politics, She is not involved,

Minnow and Prince's cohorts come to terms. But the next morning, Lora shows up, hysterical, at Paul's door. Minnow has been shot, is dead. Paul offers to get both women out. Lora refuses. Rennie agrees and Paul delivers her to St. Antoine. Upon arrival, she finds that the six o'clock plane she'd planned to take out has been cancelled. Later, she finds police at her door, come to arrest her "on suspicion."

Rennie ends up in the same jail cell as Lora. As she listens to Lora tell the story of her life, Rennie ricochets between certainty that she'll get out and a creeping fear that she'll be there forever. She listens to Lora, whom she doesn't really like, and is struck by the horror of the woman's life story. She's struck as well by Lora's courage and persistence in the face of despair.

Rennie is transformed by her stay on the island, particularly in the prison. In Canada, she was obsessed by her own mortality, the fear of cancer spreading beyond her breast. In prison, she sees herself from a new perspective. "The main thing is that nothing has happened to her yet, nobody has done anything to her, she is unharmed. She may be dying, true, but if so she's doing it slowly, relatively speaking. Other people are doing it faster: at night there are screams."

Rennie does escape unharmed, but not unchanged. A government functionary assures her that her internment was a mistake, and asks her not to write about it. She agrees. She knows they are both lying.

Rennie heads back for Canada, with a new-found capacity to live with uncertainty. She will never trust surfaces again. Most of all, she will never be able to affect non-involvement. She plans to go home and write about what she saw-not the restaurants and beaches, but the horror.

Atwood presents Rennie's story in pieces, juxtaposing the "real time" between Rennie's discovery of the policemen and rope in her apartment and her return to Canada from St. Antoine with scenes from her childhood, with her lover Jake, her doctor and her friends. The technique is effective because the flashbacks are memories brought to mind by current events, or the ones Rennie brings forcibly to mind to distract and comfort herself. By mixing the real time events on the islands with Rennie's conversations with Jake, her family and others, Atwood creates a tapestry of Rennie's life. Rather than tell us how Rennie became the person she was at the book's start, Atwood shows us through revealing incidents and dialogue. The same method of revelation is used to show how Rennie's experience on St. Antoine → changes her.

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In her earlier books, Atwood has taken the pain to tell us just what events mean to the protagonist. This time, she lets the incidents speak for themselves. By interweaving the narrative and recurrent symbols of hands, men standing at the door, of flight Atwood shows herself to be a mature and gifted writer. In Bodily Harm, the increased ..sophistication of her technique works with a compel ling series of events to make the book its author's finest work to date.. allets

Reviews

By Debbie Gross

The Color Purple, by Alice Walker. Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich.

The Color Purple is about the bonds between two sisters, and about living in the southern United States. Celie is married off at a young age to a man she doesn't like. She writes letters to God out of shame because "You better not never tell nobody but God. It'd kill your mammy." Her sister Nettie is a missionary in Africa. They spend almost a lifetime apart. Walker's writing becomes better with each book. Shug Avery, a remarkable character, is a woman who shouldn't be missed. I loved her as much as Celie does (and certainly more than Celie's husband does).

Xami: A New Spelling of My Name, by Audre Lorde. Persephone Press.

This book opens up a whole new form of writing. A blend of history, autobiography and mythology, Xami never fails to hold the reader. It is at once intimate and universal. Lorde takes us through childhood, college, jobs, and New York City gay bars. She describes being one of the first Black Lesbians out during the 1940's, '50's and '60's, and living on no money. Audre Lorde's writing has always sounded like a blend of poetry and music; this time it is filled with her life.

Mrs. Porter's Letter, by Vicki P. McConnell. Naiad Press, $6.95.

First came the lesbian romance novel (The Marquise and the Novice) and now we have the lesbian mystery novel. McConnell does a good job; the book isn't predictable and isn't full of car chases or shoot-'em-up scenes. Nyla Wade, in her first adventure in a series, makes a good detective. The main plot about finding the owners of several love letters is handled well, but the subplot involving two hookers and the "Saint" seems too rushed, as if it were an afterthought. It is good finally to have fields such as mystery, science fiction and romance include books with lesbians as main characters.

Voices in the Night: Women Speaking about Incest, McNaron & Morgan, ed. Cleis Press, $7.95.

In the past, books about incest were mostly studies filled with statistics. Voices in the Night is the first book to have poetry, short stories and other forms of reative writing by women who have been victims of cest. It is important that this book be read so that the silence and taboo surrounding incest is broken. This was not an easy book to get through, but a necessary one. There is much "bravery and generosity" here in the telling, the sharing and surviving.

In Your Hands, by Debbie Fier. Freedom's Music.

By Denise Notzon

Debbie Fier has come out with a polished, upbeat new album which has a distinctive blend of jazzy Latin rhythms and vocals reminiscent of Be Be K'Roche and Baba Yaga. The album combines the talents of Diane Lindsay on bass, Ellen Seeley from Deuce on trumpet, and a host of talented women musicians on congas, tenor sax, cello, guitar and percussion. Although Debbie Fier may be an unknown to many of us, she has succeeded in putting together an impressive arrangement of diverse music blended smoothly to create a jazzy flow of songs suitable for diverse moods from dancing to relaxing.

In Your Hands is available at local women's music outlets or from Goldenrod Distribution, 5505 Delta 7, F>River Drive, Lansing, MI 48906, (517) 323-4325.

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