Never Sentimental Meticulously Observant – Atwood triumphs again.
In the interest of complete disclosure I must admit, ashamedly, that up until a couple of months ago I didn’t know a lot about Canada’s most famous literary export Margaret Atwood. I had heard of the Handmaid’s Tale, a social critique portrayed through an unsettling dystopia, from friends who had studied it at school and I must confess it didn’t sound like my cup of tea. However I was pleasantly surprised after reading Moral Disorder Atwood’s collection of 11 short stories. These short stories, together, resemble the fragmented snapshots of a life not unlike the images captured in the dying mother’s photograph album seen in The Boys at the Lab. The majority of the stories in this collection are written in first person which gives Moral Disorder an autobiographical feel to it, the rest of the stories are narrated by Nell. One assumes after reading the blurb that all of the stories are connected and even if you didn’t read the back it is clear that each story echoes the former. The compilation starts by introducing the main character Nell who is married to Tig, the story highlights the tiny seemingly insignificant intricacies and intimacies of their marriage beautifully. Then the novel begins chronologically starting with Nell’s infancy which Atwood does not embellish, her style is realistic and this is seen through her uncertain and detached portrayal of childhood. The headless horseman reflects on Nell’s childhood relationship with her much younger sister and introduces one of the motifs throughout Moral Disorder, that of identity, this can be seen when Nell thinks to herself weather she is ‘a sister pretending to be a monster or a monster pretending to be a sister?’ The short stories trace moments of Nell’s life from childhood to her teenage years and then adulthood, there are large gaps of time between each story but I don’t think that this hinders the collection at all, if anything the omissions speak just as loudly as what has been written down by Atwood and make for even more enjoyable reading. the gaps in time allow the reader to imagine what Nell got up to in between the years of applying frozen skin cream to her face in order to help her studying to organizing a ‘crystal person’ to remove entities from her husband’s recently deceased ex-wife’s house. The gaps of time in between the stories allow the reader to flesh out the character of Nell anyway they chose which makes Moral Disorder an incredibly fulfilling read. One of my favourite aspects of this collection is the tone of the book which is that of a good humoured intelligence that made me feel as though Nell is a great friend telling stories over a coffee. Atwood’s character Nell is somewhat detached from the stories that she inhabits which enables her to be beautifully observant and witty. Although none of the premises for the short stories are revelatory; the birth of a child, affairs etc the stories are still unconventional; as a child Nell feels alienated through her intelligence, as she is older she starts a relationship with a married man and then lives on a subsistence farm in the middle of nowhere. It is these abnormalities in her life that makes her realistic. Nell’s fascination with home keeping manuals and knitting a layette for her little sister seen in the art of cooking and cleaning is replaced with the strong desire to remain rootless as she gets older. Atwood does not conjure a conventional fairytale where everything falls into place instead she exemplifies how an intelligent woman can choose to live out her life. Atwood manages to combine her writing with a multitude of intertextuality; one of the reasons that Atwood’s moral disorder is a collection of stories and not just a fragmented novel is because the majority of the short stories are about stories. The legend of sleepy hollow, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and also tales she has been told from her mother. Atwood is very aware of the process of reading and this is seen clearly in My last duchess in which Nell attempts to dissect a poem learning not only new words such as ‘verisimilitude’ (I have already forgotten what that means) but also uses the meaning of the poem as a way of understanding the anguish of her adolescence. The theme of a life’s cycles permeates this collection, of birth, growing up, growing old and dying in Moral Disorder.
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