The Robber Bride

by Margaret Atwood

By the author of The Handmaid's Tale and Alias Grace

Zenia is beautiful, smart and greedy, by turns manipulative and vulnerable, needy and ruthless; a man's dream and a woman''s nightmare. She is also dead. Just to make sure Tony, Roz andd Charis are there for the funeral. But five years on, as the three women share an indulgent, sisterly lunch, the unthinkable happens; 'with waves of ill will flowing out of her like cosmic radiation', Zenia is back...

• ISBN10: 0385260083
• ISBN13: 9780385260084
• Publish Date: 1 October 1993
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Nan A. Talese
• Edition: Trade in the USA ed.
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 466
• Language: English

Reviews

[clementine]

This one is certainly not exciting or plot-driven, but I find Atwood's writing just spellbinding. This book reminded me of Cat's Eye in a lot of ways: the preoccupation with time and its passing, the middle-aged women looking back at their lives, the focus on childhood. God, Margaret Atwood writes childhood so well, so painfully. I saw the parallels between Tony, Charis, and Roz - their cold mothers, their childhood tragedies, their bizarre rituals as coping mechanisms, their dysfunctional relationships with men. If taken as purely realistic fiction then I think the character of Zenia breaks down: she is simply too evil and too motiveless to make sense. But if we embrace the hints of supernaturalism, I think Zenia makes sense as something altogether more than a human woman. She's a shapeshifter, able to find each woman's vulnerability with minimal effort.

When we watched Rosemary's Baby in a class I took on horror during undergrad, my professor said something that stuck with me: that even if you remove the supernatural and allegorical elements from the film, it's still terrifying, because it's about a woman's complete loss of bodily autonomy. I think the same is true for this book: take Zenia out of the picture, and it's still bleak and disturbing. It's a book about women struggling to shed their broken childhoods, whose relationships with men are by and large unhealthy - these things are true regardless of Zenia's (possibly demonic) influence.

There's a lot more than can be said here - about friendship forged through mutual adversity, about motherhood and daughterhood as trauma, about female characters as archetypes, about how women navigate male-dominated spaces. (Only Charis seems to bypass this in her professional life.) It's a slow burner, and I understand why it wouldn't appeal - but Margaret Atwood can frequently enchant me with her writing even when the narrative itself is not particularly thrilling.