Surfacing is Margaret
Atwood’s second novel, dating from 1972. All of the facts in that sentence are
significant in defining the strengths and considerable weaknesses of a most
curious novel. It reads very much as an apprenticeship novel – good, but not
quite right – and it struggles to transcend the social politics of both its
author and the time in which it was written. Nineteen-seventies feminism would
have been all but mute without the didactic. And, despite the author’s attempts
to the contrary, the didactic is the underlying tone of this novel. Overall, to
be honest, it is a bit of a mess. But it’s an intriguing mess. The fine line
between genius and nonsense is seldom more evident than in this novel.
Thematically, it has tremendous power but in terms of writing craft it is all
over the place.
An unnamed narrator, a young
Canadian woman, returns to her childhood home on an island in Quebec following
the unexplained disappearance of her father, a naturalist. Accompanying her are
her boyfriend, Joe, and a married couple, David and Anna. The return to one’s
roots is a familiar trope in fiction, of course, allowing protagonists to review
the tracks of their lives that have brought them to the mature characters they
are. Flaws can be traced, decisions or actions or events uncovered which help
to explain their personalities. Ron Rash did much the same thing recently with Saints
at the River, a novel which bears similar flaws to those in Surfacing.
It is, one suspects, a structural fault with this type of psychological
character study. It is too simplistic, perhaps, to reduce the complexity of
human character into a historical recreation of past events or traumas and a
concomitant extrapolation of cause and effect. We’re not that straightforward.
In fairness to Atwood, there is more than that going in Surfacing, but nonetheless it is a significant structural
component of the novel.
However, you certainly can’t
fault Atwood’s ambition. The novel is short – fewer than 200 pages – and yet
she manages to pack in a thematic power which comes uncomfortably close to
overload. There is gender, of course, as depicted by the cavalier, at times
brutal ways the two women are treated by their menfolk. And there is a strong
element of nationalism in the novel, particularly an aggressive
anti-Americanism. All of this is quite acceptable, but when the thematic
tableau extends to include specific linkages to the Holocaust, through the
narrator’s Germanic origins, one feels the author is allowing herself to get
carried away. Less is more.
Allied to her treatment of
nationalism, there is a strong message about dispossession, the manner in which
traditional Canadian ways and customs are being obliterated by incoming
American culture. This is a very worthwhile thing to consider: the culture of a
society is a powerful but fragile commodity and I’m certainly aware, as a Scot
250 years after the event, of the legacy of the Highland Clearances in my own
country.
Therefore, this element of
the novel could be intriguing, but it doesn’t work. This is because of the
ridiculously cartoonish way in which the “Americans” in the novel are
described. They are Beavis and Butthead on manoeuvres and as two-dimensionally
obvious as it’s possible to be. It doesn’t matter in the slightest that Atwood
inverts this by – shock, horror, who'd have thought it? – revealing that they
are, in fact, indigenous Canadians and not Americans at all. The narrator's
preconceptions about them may have been proved to be wrong, but the
characterisation which brings about this revelation remains two-dimensional and
over-the-top. It is, to be honest, simply a cheap trick on the author’s part,
allowing her to make a thematic point that isn't warranted by the strength of
the narrative.
From the start of the novel
there is a sense of disconnection. The narrator cannot reconcile being back in
the surroundings of her childhood while in the company of friends from her adult life: “either the
three of them are in the wrong place or I am.” The reason for her return is to
seek traces of her father, who has inexplicably gone missing and may be dead or
may still be alive. Back in the family cabin once more, the sound of road
traffic to which she has become so accustomed is replaced by the birdsong she
remembers from childhood. Past and present, nature and civilisation, ambition
and fear, certainty and doubt, they begin to jostle in her mind. As is
customary for this sort of “back to one’s youth” novel, the device is used to
unravel the protagonist’s personality. Memories surface: family rancour, death,
violence. And, in turn, more recent memories, buried deeply in her psyche, are
revealed: an abortion, an affair, relationships and breakdowns.
All of this is revealed to us
through the narrator – and how irritatingly postmodern is it that the central
character doesn’t even have a name so she has to be referred to as “the
narrator”? She is, of course, unreliable. By the end of the novel she has
completely lost her senses. Or has she? Has she, in fact, regained them? Has
she recovered the animal spirit that lurks within us, the gnostic spark of
knowledge which modernity and its brutalising ways have extinguished? Because
now the novel begins to take an ecopastoral turn. The rational world of science
and machinery that we have created is in conflict with the animalism around us:
this has been the Jungian rallying cry of fiction from Modernism onwards.
Although it is well handled, in honesty others have done it better: Pincher
Martin, The Orchard Keeper, Briefing for a Descent into Hell, Housekeeping, The
Glass Bead Game, Bartleby the Scrivener, The Life and Times of Michael K, the
poetry of Ted Hughes. All of them explore similar territory to this, and, until
the remarkable conclusion of Surfacing, all of them are superior.
Why? There are two reasons,
one thematic and one craft. Thematically, there is just too much going on.
There is nothing wrong, in a novel-length work, with thematic complexity, with
a deep interlinking of themes and ideas. But here they don’t so much interlink
as collide. It’s a dodgem car of a novel, its ideas forever careering into the
buffers and crashing into one another. One minute it’s ecopastoralism, then
it’s gender politics, then nationalism, then the Holocaust. And the underlying
fault is that the only thing linking these strands together is the flawed and
unreliable narration of the main character. At times she is clearly not sane
and while it is possible to fashion a novel around the machinations of an
insane protagonist, here it cannot work because the thematic targets are too
varied. Crime and Punishment works because Raskolnikov’s obessions
slide, in the course of the novel, from a greedy desire for both money and
knowledge (specifically the knowledge of murder) into a gnawing desire for
redemption. Although Raskolnikov’s sanity could be doubted, the linearity of
the novel’s thematic exploration is entirely consistent. In Surfacing, that
thematic exploration flails about like a woman beating off midges in the
gloaming.
In terms of writing craft,
the principal issue is characterisation. What do we have here? Firstly, men are
shits – that old staple of feminist literature. Therefore, we have David who
forces his wife to strip while he photographs her, while Joe comes close to
raping the narrator. No. There needs to be a balance somewhere, a male
character who is not a sexual predator. Secondly, American men are even bigger
shits – that staple of leftist, anti-American writing. Thirdly, anyone embraced
by modern culture is basically uncivilised, while anyone in touch with the
natural wilderness has a primeval connection with some deeper spiritual
knowledge. There is a ham-fistedness to much of this that is infuriating,
because it damages what otherwise would be a very fine piece of writing.
Atwood’s admirers will argue
that I’m simplifying what is in the text to make a point, and they may be
right. The ending definitely suggests a far greater control of theme than I’m
allowing. And certainly, the narrator is a remarkably complex character and it
would not do to take anything she says at face value. Truth shifts and warps as
the story progresses. Nothing is clearly understood. Therefore, it could be
argued, some of the caricatures I complain of could, in fact, be
representations of that very unreliability, and therefore inverted in meaning?
Well, perhaps so, but it’s possible to make this sort of argument about
virtually any novel of ideas that has ever been written. I agree there doesn’t
have to be a moment when an author presents “this is what I believe” but
somewhere along the line one needs to get a sense of what is being addressed.
That only really emerges in the novel’s terrible and wonderful conclusion.
In this, the narrator breaks
free from all shackles and reverts, briefly, to a Rousseauian state of natural
savagery. The ending is far and away the most interesting part of the novel.
This is where you see Atwood the novelist really beginning to emerge. All
before is preliminary and, it might be argued, extraneous. William Golding
would have started this novel here. It is surreal and terrifying. The narrator
becomes something other – freed from rational instinct but somehow different
from the wilderness dweller we might have expected. She doesn’t become some
vessel for an ancient spirituality, nor does she find an animalistic core. She
doesn’t become a visionary. And yet she does manage to channel some of those
impulses and forces. It is a peculiar thing, and this is writing of impressive
depth and complexity. It echoes Suttree’s sojourn in the mountains in Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name but,
here, the narrator finds some sense of inner truth that Suttree would not
attain until his typhus attack: “I have to recant, give up the old belief that
I am powerless and because of it nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone.”
As a theme, that’s about as
interesting as it gets. No man is an island. No victim can be despatched
without a trace. No act, however guileless, is without consequence. No human
can exist without exerting an influence – for good but also for ill – on other
human beings. And for all its faults, it’s definitely worth reading Surfacing
in order to come to this moment of departure.
