Book review
I have read much of Margaret Atwood’s work although I am not a fan of sci-fi and dystopian literature and therefore favor her earlier novels. I am late getting to this book published in 1993, but it is among her best.
In this novel Atwood reminds women that although it is often men in powerful positions they consider to be the root of their problems, a woman, posing as a friend can be a formidable opponent and as much a threat to their happiness as any man. In fact, in this novel Atwood reinforces her point, portraying the men as insubstantial and weak, existing as bit players on the sidelines to the main action, never players to what happens on the field. It is the woman that is the focus of Atwood attention, the characters readers get to know and care about, not the men.
The story takes place in Toronto between 1945 and 1990 and focuses on four very different women who have little in common except their experience with someone they believed to be their friend. Having negotiated those difficult times in their past, they have since developed a loyalty to each other and meet on a regular basis to renew their friendship.
Atwood introduces readers to Tony, Charis and Roz, former classmates at a university in Toronto and another woman named Zenia, who also attended the university but someone they had little to do with, a woman surrounded by hearsay, whispers and gossip. In later years after Tony developed a friendship with Zenia and invited her into her life, things took a deep downhill dive. Zenia, a beautiful, manipulative woman found a way of insinuating herself in each of these women’s lives and under the guise of friendship, used them, seduced their men, threw them aside when she got bored and disappeared, usually with pockets of cash.
Tony is a scholar and a university professor, an introvert who spends hours researching war history and replicating famous battles on a platform at home using beans and monopoly pieces to represent the players. She is someone more comfortable living in the past than in the present. Tony is short and not particularly attractive with her large horn rimmed glasses and a body shaped more like a tree trunk without the curves created by full breasts, a tiny waist and the undulating hips many men find attractive. Those attributes in fact belong to Zenia, a woman Tony thought was her friend who she eventually came to hate. Tony is the most pragmatic of the three woman, someone who thinks logically, moving methodically from point A to point B when considering a problem. She is also left handed and chastised for being so in school, reacted by developing her own personal language, speaking words backwards, a habit she still falls into when she is stressed. Tony is married to West, a musicologist and the couple is childless. Tony spends her days moving pieces of her make believe armies around a platform simulating battles and West spends his days tinkering in the tower of the house composing strange musical arrangements.
Charis is a hippie-like earth mother, a frail vulnerable woman who wears long gathered skirts, flowered shawls and scarves draped around her neck. In her childhood she was called Karen, but when she left that abusive life behind she abandoned her name and became Charis, a New Age vegetarian who loves crystals, favors herbal teas, fragrant bath oils and medicinal juices. She teaches yoga, sees auras and believes she has the ability to help others heal. Although all three women have experienced difficulties when they were children, Charis is more scarred by her past than either Tony or Roz. Charis lives in a run-down house on one of the Toronto islands that like others there was once an old cottage. It was poorly built, has no insulation and is a minefield of half-finished projects that Charis started to improve the living space but never completed. Charis is not married but has a nineteen year old daughter Augusta now attending university. She once enjoyed the company of Billy, a young man from the American South who evaded the draft by escaping to Canada. He has been living with Charis for some time now, enjoying the free room and board and the casual sex that comes with this arrangement. He has a close network of friends he meets with regularly who have also escaped the draft and the horrors of the Vietnam War and who try to help others do the same.
Roz outwardly appears to be a fierce woman, the founder and president of WiseWomanWorld, a successful woman’s magazine. She is wealthy and lives in a huge professionally decorated home with her son Larry now twenty-two and her twin girls, Paula and Erin now fifteen. She frets and worries about her children, wondering what they are up to when she is not around and what will become of them in the future. Although she appears confident, Roz is full of insecurities. She is plump, loves comfort food and smokes, especially when she is stressed. She was married to Mitch, a second rate lawyer who picked her up as a trophy wife and has cheated on her many times during their marriage, chasing everything in a skirt that caught his wandering eye. Although a serial womanizer, Mitch always came home to Roz who continued to take him back even after years of his philandering.
Zenia established friendships with all three women, following a common pattern. She would arrive engaging and charming, quickly seducing each woman through the privacy of their shared, comfortable and special friendship. The women, pulled into this seductive web were encouraged to reveal their psychic baggage as Zenia quietly exploited their vulnerabilities, calculated what loss would hurt them most and then used it to get what she wanted. She then threatened blackmail, seduced and stole the men they cared about and when she got bored, discarded them and moved on, leaving everyone in her destructive wake. The women were left feeling used and angry realizing what Zenia had done while the men felt desolate at being rejected but remained blind to her seductive ploys. Zenia loves no one, not even the men she takes from her friends. She never wanted them in the first place, she only wanted the pleasure of taking something away from her friends. Zenia likes to cause trouble, just because she can.
Although Tony, Charis and Roz are all smart women, they are not street smart like Zenia, who is a back alley fighter, is sexier, smarter and lies, cheats and steals. Zenia has an entire suitcase full of past histories she has created to use during these friendships, lives she makes so real each of the women she attacks is easily sucked into her fantasy. They never really know if she was a German Jew, a white Russian Princess or an orphan of Romanian gypsies whose mother was stoned. In one of her fabricated childhoods she was sexually abused by a Greek priest. In another her mother rented her out to men and in another she spoke of living in Paris and eating garbage and cats. She recounts a wild work history having done everything from reporting from a war torn city, spying in a foreign country to hooking her way across Europe, rolling the occasional drunk, waiting tables and cleaning toilets. And Zenia is always broke, always borrowing money she never returns. When she first appears in the lives of these women, she has an entry strategy which will gain her their sympathy. She says she has cancer or has been beaten and thrown out by her live-in lover or has AIDS. Whatever fits the situation at the time. And she easily rolls with the punches, quick to stand on her feet and improvise when confronted and questioned about her lies. She is a cunning villain, a destructive, malicious, unscrupulous force. But she is also is also a mirror into the dark world of the subconscious of these women, the person that each of them has not become because they could not or because they chose not to.
A few years later when news arrived that Zenia has been killed in a terrorist explosion in Lebanon, Tony, Charis and Roz attended her funeral where a sealed tin contained her ashes was laid to rest. They were all relieved, happy this evil woman was out of their lives. She ha wrecked so much havoc, threatening Tony’s career, taking away Charis’s dear friend Billy and causing the end of Roz’s marriage. But five years later as they meet for lunch, Zenia mysteriously enters the restaurant, walks past them and seats herself at the back. The women are shocked! How can this be? Zenia is already dead. They quickly realize that Zenia has done it again — they have been had! But they spend less time on their questions and more worrying about what will happen next. They don’t want to talk to her, think about her or have her mess up their heads. Of all of them, Charis is the one less surprised by Zenia reappearance. She doesn’t believe in death only in transitions that bring an earthly body from one life to the next. People who experience death can come back to life again. It is all part of life’s learning experience, part of Charis’s misunderstood, weird beliefs about living and life.
Each of the women assumes a defensive posture as Zenia’s appearance brings back unwelcome memories and fear. They know what Zenia is capable of because of what she has done in the past and each wonders why she is back. She must have some unfinished business with them.
Zenia is beautiful, with huge eyes and high cheek bones. She is smart, greedy and pure evil, a ruthless sociopath who enjoys hurting people. Although she drives the novel, she is someone neither Tony, Charis, Roz nor readers every quite figure out because she shows a different version of herself every time she speaks, adjusting her history to create a story she has decided someone wants to hear. She has no voice of her own, so readers only know her through the perceptions of others. And that is a shame, the one part of the novel I missed and I think other readers will too. We all want to know what makes Zenia tick. What drives this woman who appears to be everyman’s sexual fantasy and every woman’s nightmare? What has made her the incredible monster she has become?
Atwood is a master story teller, slowly revealing her story at an even but quick pace. She has given Tony, Charis and Roz wide ranging profiles, deep revealing portraits that include their past lives and extend over several pages so readers appreciate their values and beliefs, understand their thinking and accept their behavior. We hear what goes on in their heads and find out about their childhoods. Yet Zenia drives the plot. She is the one who makes things happen and it is disappointing that we never get an opportunity to understand her. She remains unknown to us.
In this story of betrayed, Atwood shows how women find support, acceptance and friendship with other women. However the men in the book do not receive such kind treatment. They are all portrayed as weak and at the mercy of the so called “weaker sex”.
Atwood maintains the high quality of her writing complete with her insightful characterizations and her dry sense of humour. She always gets readers to ask themselves interesting questions and in this novel they come at the end after the dust settles. She suggests Zenia may actually have given these woman an important but painful gift, because their experiences helped them deal with serious issues in their lives and as a result they are now more confident. Tony is also insightful enough to ask her friends if Zenia was in any way like them or if they were in anyway like her, suggesting there may be a little of Zenia in all of them.
I have read more recently that Atwood used Barbara Amiel, the wife of Conrad Black the former newspaper publisher, financier, historian, commentator and columnist, as a model for Zenia. It is an interesting thought!
- Goodreads rating – 3.83
- REVIEW – Paula Dembeck