I don’t know how this book ended up on my shelves. I think my partner brought it to me in a box of used books pulled from the end of a driveway, like some sacrifice to a mighty beast so that he may live another day. Or maybe the box was a thoughtful gift. Either way, I’m grateful.
It is rare to love an author’s writing so much that you will continue to read the novel despite every character making your skin crawl. Margaret Atwood is that author for me. Every sentence she crafts make my heart sing - which is why I could read Life Before Man and the manipulative, selfish characters so perfectly crafted that I didn’t fully hate them. I still wanted to know what happened in their pathetic, messed-up lives.
“Imprisoned by walls of their own construction, here are three people, each in midlife, in midcrisis, forced to make choices--after the rules have changed. Elizabeth, with her controlled sensuality, her suppressed rage, is married to the wrong man. She has just lost her latest lover to suicide. Nate, her gentle, indecisive husband, is planning to leave her for Lesje, a perennial innocent who prefers dinosaurs to men. Hanging over them all is the ghost of Elizabeth's dead lover...and the dizzying threat of three lives careening inevitably toward the same climax.”
Set in Toronto in the 70's, the description of the Royal Ontario Museum and its contents was of great interest to me. I've never been, but I would like to make a trip in the near future to see it. There is one part where Elizabeth walks to the planetarium - a planetarium, that, if it still existed, I would have begged my parents to bring me to during my obsessive astronomy phase. Here is a photo:
Beautiful, right?
Overall, for what this novel lacks in plot, it makes up by taking the reader spelunking in the dark caverns of the character’s minds - Elizabeth is cold and calculating, and any real emotion is redesigned as anger and pettiness. Nate is pathetic, making mess after mess and not knowing how to get out of his marriage without blasting music Elizabeth doesn't like and frying up liver as a nightly snack. Lesje is stuck in her own head and, as she is a vertebrate palaeontologist, in her daydreams of tracking and observing dinosaurs. She muddles through life feeling awkward and split between her Ukrainian and Jewish heritage, though never fully experiencing either. Every adult that plays a central role in this book play with each other’s emotions and are generally awful people. If you want to like the characters that you're going to spend a couple hours with while reading, this is not the book for you.
It begins with a suicide, a broken marriage, and depression, and that is generally the vibe throughout. That being said, the only portions of the novel that sent me into a tizzy were the children. We must think of the children! The adults do - but only to use them against each other. They’re pawns in their parent’s game, and they know it. Their parents know they know it. And, much to Elizabeth and Nate's surprise, there's a new piece about to be added to the board.
Margaret Atwood was ambitious for tackling these subjects when she did. Suicide, mental health, open relationships and marriages - these are topics I have no problem speaking about but my grandmother is still getting used to, and she's 10 years younger than Ms. Atwood. Big props to her for putting this out there when she did, and writing with honesty at a time when it was more difficult for a woman to do so.
3 stars.
Overall, a pretty depressing read to end my April. Beautiful, but depressing. Like saplings planted in a devastated tract of land that used to be a forest. Or that right now, most of our creative outputs are being spurred collectively by a pandemic that is taking thousands of lives. That sort of thing. Art out of pain.
Happy reading,
Holly
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