Good Bones by Margaret Atwood Page A

editorial inquiry to Atwood came as a request for a submission “entirely devoted to the subject of ‘The Female Body.’ Knowing how well you have written on this topic … this capacious topic.” She is so quick that she immediately picks up the kernel of her tale, telling us of the aging of her capacious topic: “My topic feels like hell.” In the course of the tale, she shows how this topic, the female body, has been exploited and misused, by itself and by society; how it is used to sell and is sold. We know and need to know these things, but it is the wit with which this often overworked topic speaks that makes it fresh and disturbing.
    “Alien Territory” is the male twin to this piece, and here she returns briefly to the tale of Bluebeard. This may be the single most slippery story in the whole repertoire of fairy tales, and it holds endless fascination for Atwood. As an undergraduate at university, she was already listening to BélaBartók’s
Duke Bluebeard’s Castle
and drawing water colours of
The Robber Bridegroom
. Through decades of writing, she has continued to probe the story’s dark entrails. In “Bluebeard’s Egg,” the title story of her 1983 collection, she refers to the traditional version in which the three sisters, in sequence, discovered dismembered bodies of previous wives in Bluebeard’s castle. In the version she invents in
Good Bones
, the third sister finds a small dead child with its eyes wide open locked in Bluebeard’s secret room. The narrator, whose motive, like that of many modern women, is to heal Bluebeard, obviously has no idea how far down into his psyche she will have to go to do so.
    Atwood insisted that “The Female Body” and “Alien Territory” were to be called not essays, but “pieces.” They are driven by a deeply moral imagination, and fraught with warnings: as a civilization we are destroying ourselves. In the
tour de force
“My Life as a Bat,” the narrator decides it was better to be a bat than to be human. She hopes to be a bat again. Reincarnation as an animal would be “At least a resting place. An interlude of grace.” And Atwood offers an evocative vision, through a bat’s eyes, of a world in which there are still goddesses in the caves and grottoes. When asked by The British Defense and Aid Fund for South Africa to donate a manuscript for sale at Sotheby’s to assist students in South Africa and Namibia, Atwood donated “My Life as a Bat.” It carries the full weight of her ironic vision of our collective human achievement.
    Good Bones
is scrupulously organized and ends with the title story about aging, a subject Atwood confronts with celebratory stoicism. Reading it, I hear W.B. Yeats’s contrapuntal voice speaking of aging in “Sailing to Byzantium”: “An aging man is but a paltry thing / A tattered coat upon a stick … sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal.” I would speculate that Atwood would not entirely approve of Yeats’s egocentric, romantic fantasy of escaping the humanthrough the transcendence of art. Unlike Yeats, she speaks to her aging bones with affection rather than with contempt. There is good in the real, in the minimal, if we could only accept our human limitations. As she urges her bones to the top of the stairs, she speaks to them as to a faithful dog: “There. We’re at the top.
Good
Bones! Good
Bones
! Keep on going.”
    In
Good Bones
, Margaret Atwood may insist that the reader look at hard truths, but she never forgoes her belief in magic and the transformative powers of the imagination. As she once said, we may not be able to change the world, but we can change our way of looking at it. Some of her magic is to be felt in the way she chisels her stories to an adamantine brilliance. Few modern writers are as off-beat and funny; few can orchestrate images of such stunning precision; few can be as wise.

BY MARGARET ATWOOD
    FICTION
The Edible Woman
(1969)
Surfacing
(1972)
Lady