Bodily Harm

Rating:
Summary: Shoulda stayed at home girl!
Review: I enjoyed this novel on many levels. It is a great story, skilfully woven, laced with trademark Atwood satiric wit and all of the brand-name dropping you've come to expect: Drano, Holiday Inn, McDonald's, Elastoplast, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Bank of Nova Scotia, Chatelaine magazine, Ovaltine, Crest toothpaste, and not just soup, but Campbell's Chicken Noodle. I love how she does this, it seems so... Canadian!
The strength of Bodily Harm is the way Atwood delves deep into the psyche of the protagonist, the young female Toronto journalist, Rennie Wilford. Flashback portions reveal Rennie's history, connecting us to her narrow/stifled/religiously-hypocritical upbringing in backwater Griswold Ontario. It's a history she resents. Flashbacks illuminate her relationship history also. We really get to KNOW Rennie, and the more light that Atwood throws across this life, the more Rennie emerges as someone unfulfilled at her core.
And now Rennie's life is on the fritz. She is coming to terms with her partial mastectomy and the recent breakup with Jake, two problems that she imagines are directly related to each other. She becomes obsessed with the word "malignant" and feels that everyone dear to her (even her own body) is rejecting her. On top of this, someone has just broken into her apartment and, instead of robbing her, has left behind an ominous threatening message.
Change of scenery is badly needed.
So Rennie accepts a Caribbean assignment to the island of St. Antoine, and now comes the part of the story that could be summarized by saying "Shoulda stayed at home!"
This "tropical paradise" is really an economically depressed dump! And her small-town Ontario naivete is no match for the shifty characters she meets on this island. She is soon intricately involved in the political turmoil of St. Antoine, and her trip ends up being everything BUT the paradise and recuperation she was hoping for.
Illegal smuggling, bloodshed, betrayal, malnourishment, imprisonment... forget emotional improvement, physical survival becomes the issue!
It's as though Rennie goes to St. Antoine because of bodily harm from within, and finds that she must leave the island because of bodily harm from without. There's more to the story than this for sure, but this is an interesting aspect of it. The island did nothing to solve her problems, but it certainly made her see those problems for what they were... a part of her life, but not the whole.

Rating:
Summary: Haunting Look at the Ways Our Bodies Can Be Harmed
Review: The aptly-named Bodily Harm by Margaret Atwood is a suspensfully-woven tale that keeps you turning pages. Focused on the harms that can befall a woman, it takes a philosophical look at both the physical and emotional dangers Rennie Wilford faces as she comes to terms with a major life change.

After her mastectomy, journalist Rennie Wilford and her boyfriend break up and she begins a strange affair with her doctor, who makes her feel almost complete. However, when Rennie returns to her apartment one day to find a length of coiled rope on her bed and no sign of forced entry, she is convinced that it would be a good idea to take a long vacation and get out of town for a while.

Under these circumstances, Rennie ends up on the island of St. Antoine in the Caribbean during a time of political upheaval. There she finds herself being drawn into a complex and dangerous world she doesn't understand.

A recurring image of Rennie's grandmother, who has misplaced her hands, seems to serve as a grand metaphor for the story. It seems like throughout the process and aftermath of her mastectomy, Rennie won't let people get close to her or touch her. This leads to her breakup with her boyfriend. She has forgotten how to reach outside of herself. Wrapped up in her own misery, she is self-focused, and it is only as she is drawn into the events in St. Antoine that she really gets past her physical change and grows to understand what it means to be a truly complete woman.

Atwood is always very good at making even banal surroundings seem sinister, and the events surrounding Rennie in St. Antoine are written to keep you on the edge of your seat. Trust no one, for they are not who they seem. But trust Atwood to give you a good excuse to sit home on a Friday night.

Rating:
Summary: Discomforting and disturbing
Review: This is the second novel by Atwood that I've read, along with a few short stories, and I'm not sure I have the intestinal fortitude to read another. Her grim themes pop up again here like mushrooms after a spring rain. Like "The Handmaid's Tale", this novel is suffused with anger and darkness, although the locale this time is a sunny tropical island. Rennie, the main character, is a thoroughly unlikable woman: bitter, angry, cynical, a bit of a coward. Very human, in other words. The story flips back and forth between what is happening on the island and her life back in a sterile and constricted Canada. Through the painful events in the book, it seems that blame for all the violence and agony in the world is laid at the feet of men: men as users and abusers, corrupted by power, not to be trusted, but also loved and desired despite all that (and does that make us women "weak" and somehow partners in our own subjugation?) I found all the ambivalence very wearing. But life is full of ambivalence. Those looking for a light relaxing read that leaves no aftertaste would be advised to choose something else.