the fatling

Okay, it’s been confirmed that Her Fatness is all caught up on this blog, so I’ll pick up regular posting again at erratic and unpredictable times.  Like right now!

I just did a Google search on “the fatling,” because I am very humble (you can tell because I didn’t use any caps).  This site is the first result, but I also discovered that, according to the free dictionary by Farlex, the word “fatling” actually means “a young farm animal fattened for killing.”  Which is disappointing.  I’d always thought I was fattening myself up for a natural death at a ripe old age.  Although according to this definition, I will be forever young (yay!) and a farm animal (boo!  Or baa…).

I didn’t like The Year of the Flood quite as much as I liked Oryx and Crake, but it’s an excellent second book for Atwood’s Maddadam trilogy (she’s writing the third right now, as she informed CBR and myself on Twitter.  Swoon).  I do appreciate that rather than a straight sequel, Atwood chose to tell stories that run concurrent with the events of Oryx and Crake.  This time there are two POV characters: Toby, a reluctant member of the God’s Gardeners faith/ecoactivist group, and Ren, and exotic dancer who grew up in the same God’s Gardener group that Toby belonged to.  The action here takes place largely in the near-future pleeblands, economically depressed communities that buttress North America’s hermetically sealed “compounds” reserved for the rich and their scientific research teams.

Both Crake/Glenn and Snowman/Jimmy from the first novel show up periodically throughout the story, but this one belongs to the women.  Atwood expands on the themes of desensitizing sexual commodification she broached in Oryx and Crake by exploring Toby’s victimization at the hands of a sadistic employer and the way the specter of her rape impacts her life.  Saddled with a pretty horrific mother who joined the God’s Gardeners to be with her lover, Ren grows into adulthood with a split consciousness—aware of the material excesses of her world, and yet disconnected from the faith that more or less raised her.  Atwood handles the idea of sexual victimization gently and with pathos—there are no squicky, highly detailed rape scenes that could be confused with titillation, and Ren chooses to become a trapeze dancer at a high-end sex club and neither she nor Atwood think she has anything to apologize for.

My favorite parts of the book revolve around the God’s Gardeners, which is fleshed out and proves to be a fascinating blend of faith, science, and stewardship plagued as all religions are by human frailty.  In particular, I loved Ren’s friendship with the young con artist extraordinaire, Amanda and Toby’s slow evolution from frightened refugee to doubtful believer.  The sermons by Adam One (the leader of God’s Gardeners) work on both an earnest and an ironic level, and the attention to detail in the rituals of worship is really impressive.

This book can absolutely be read independently of Oryx and Crake, but considering how great that book is, it would be silly to deny yourself the pleasure of fully immersing in Atwood’s terrifying, beautiful vision of a future we might still have a chance to subvert.

*This is a total aside, but in reading some of the existing criticism on these books, Atwood is unfairly taken to task for the pun-heavy names of products and corporations in this world (i.e. CorpSeCorp, Chickie Nobs, SecretBurgers, etc).  Atwood’s puns are no less heavy-handed than any of David Foster Wallace’s, specifically in Infinite Jest (ONANtiad, Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, John “No Relation” Wayne anyone?), which presents a near-future not too far removed from Atwood’s.  In this exploration of Atwood’s works, I’m surprised by how much critics seem to do everything in their power to discredit her, but that’s perhaps another post entirely.*

I’m going to wax philosophical here.  This wasn’t my favorite Atwood book (it was really just a stopgap solution while I waited for The Year of the Flood to arrive at my library), but I so enjoyed the experience of reading it that my lack of enthusiasm for the content didn’t negatively affect my overall view of the book.

In part, it’s just an extension of my lifelong obsession with words.  As a kid, I’d read pretty much anything that was within reach.  I’ve become a bit more discerning as I’ve gotten older, but in general, the rule still stands that if it can be read, I will read it.

Reading is really the only form of entertainment I can think of that still manages to be legally available for free to pretty much the entire population of America.  If you’ve got an address, you can get a library card, and if you don’t, you can still hang out in the library all day.  You can go hang out in a bookstore and read for hours without ever buying anything.  No electricity is required to read a book, although a good light source helps, and I am so happy that I chose to be a reader.

I’m also happy that I’ve been binging on Margaret Atwood.  I had counted her among my favorite writers for years, based solely on having read The Handmaid’s Tale at age fourteen and The Blind Assassin a few years ago.  Cat’s Eye is her semi-autobiographical novel, based loosely on her childhood as the daughter of an Ontario entomologist and her destructive friendships with other girls at her school.  While I was annoyed by Atwood’s choice to make protagonist Elaine Risley a painter rather than a writer (seriously, writers, reading about writing isn’t more boring than reading about painting or sculpting or what have you, and aren’t you supposed to write what you know anyway?), her description of female friendship and the cruelty that women inflict on one another from an early age is spot on.

The back and forth narrative between Elaine as a middle-aged woman attending a retrospective of her artwork and her coming of age in a Toronto suburb is very Atwoodian, with both threads finally converging toward the end.  In many ways, this is the bleakest of Atwood’s works I’ve read to date, because the lack of any speculative fiction angle denies the reader the hope for redemption that always accompanies tales of humanity’s demise.  For Elaine Risler, the only comfort to be had is cold, the knowledge that she has overcome her childhood rival, Cordelia, but at a great cost.

The story itself is unremarkable—the protagonist is abused, and then turns the abuse back on her tormentors—but what Atwood captures brilliantly is the emotional limbo of being a woman, the aching sadness of knowing how much you’ve been hurt by other women, and how much they’ve hurt you, and having no idea what to do about it.  Elaine is an extremely passive narrator, and yet that is the book’s strength—Elaine is on a journey she didn’t particularly want to take where her life simply happens as she drifts by, and it’s still compelling every step of the way.