Fairy Tales Unbridled

The Robber Bride

by Margaret Atwood

Doubleday Press

$23.50

The Robber Bride is no sweet, fancifully updated fairy tale. There are no easy lessons, no simple explanations, no transparent role playing. In fact, the book ends with its most urgent questions unanswered.

At first glance, you might take this for a fairy tale in which all of the principle roles have been altered to fit women, just to prove that it can be done. That is how Roz, a brassy CEO, and her terrible twins compromise to make their bedtime stories more acceptable. "They opt for women in every role," even if this means making life for these heroines more complex or uncomfortable. For instance, when playing their own version of "The Robber Bridegroom," "they dress their Barbie dolls up [in bridal clothes and] hurl the brides over the stair railings or drown them in the bathtub." But while the dolls effortlessly return to life, the people in the novel, like the three pigs in the twin's version of the classic children's tale, tend to "get boiled." Atwood's comic parallels, even when a little heavy-handed, are always a lot of fun. After all, it's only make believe.

Real life in this novel is even more complex, funny and fascinating than its mock fairy-tale frame. Atwood's latest novel involves three college acquaintances' entanglements with evil: Roz, the daughter of successful Jewish immigrants; Tony, a historian of warfare; and Charis, a believer in aura and the virtues of fruit. In telling their stories, Atwood takes a stab at the rationales of many such modern fairy tales, examining contemporary female stereotypes as well as issues of personal and moral responsibility. Her heroines have to fight for what is theirs, and often seem to lose what little they had. There are no Prince Charmings here, much less any real male characters to contend with.

Instead, the novel's bad "guy"--and perhaps the characters' liberator--is a wonderfully sinister, manipulative creature named Zenia. Zenia, however, resists sexist categorizations in her own way: while seemingly a femme fatal, she cannot be simply, reductively seductive. Instead she remains the evil enigma. Nor is she ultimately fatal to any one of her "brides," although she is to her bridegrooms. Terrible as it may be, Zenia makes the necessary, awful decisions that none of her female victims would have made for themselves, and always for her own profit.

Yet the tone of the novel is not vindictive. The Robber Bride is not the self-indulgence of a man-hater run amok. Rather it seeks to exploit and break down, sometimes clumsily, the myths surrounding the first generation of the women's movement. Atwood's tongue-in-cheek allusions enable her to wittily explore the complexities of gender relations in this generation. At times, however, her acuity yields to carelessness. This is most notable in her depiction of Charis, and her airy speculations on numerology; Charis relates that seven is "two threes and a one, which [she] prefers because threes are graceful pyramids as well as a goddess number." This characterization, as well as the descriptions of Roz's stereotyped homosexual assistant Bryce, might be crude or dull if it wasn't tempered with a whimsical compassion. Here Atwood's specialty is the grim glee she takes in detailing the disaster that Roz, Tony and Charis invite into their lives along with Zenia.

Atwood digs up the pieces of their experiences, reconstructing them the way a historian puts together the pieces of a life, a movement or a battle. With all of the talk of war between the sexes, for instance, we might forget to think about the battles between supposedly allied forces. For Tony, the novel's academic, "the personal is not political...the personal is military" and "war is what happens when language fails." Such personal complications are what decide and entangle the roots of history. It is often at this point that fiction begins to enter into the picture. Embarrassing realities are suppressed by all characters on all sides, and it is Zenia's particular expertise to unearth these and turn them against those who had considered her a friend. Zenia's aura is big enough and bad enough for her to signal inevitable ruin for any hapless prospect on her list.

Curiously, all three women enter into friendships with Zenia entirely aware of her reputation. This principal conceit is the most glaring flaw in this generally good novel. Even Charis, resident healer and spiritual expert, who judges people based upon their aureal colors, can't seem to tell when Zenia's automatically destructive powers are levelled at her. At one point, these are described as "waves of ill will flow[ing] out of her like cosmic radiation."

Yet Zenia is the agent not only of the undoing of each woman, but also of each's self-confrontation. She is a force which brings out their inner strengths as she defeats them. The battles they fight with her are "not in any one place" but "in the texture of the world itself" or "in the tiny incandescent fires of the brain that flash up and burn out."

It is not a story for the fainthearted. If the twins had any say in the matter, they might have insisted unregretfully that in any good story somebody "had to be boiled." But Roz, Tony, and Charis have scars which will take longer to heal, or may be as permanent and insidious as the evil which caused them. It's lucky for them that they have not only each other, but also some good stories to tell. Ironically, it is Zenia who ends up as the unifying thread of their experience. This Robber-Bridegroom, in the shape of a svelte Bluebeard in drag, may be the most delectably detestable character in any novel this year. And that in itself is not a wholly evil thing.