[In] Margaret Atwood's new novel, Bodily Harm,… readers of her previous comic novels will find much that is familiar. Here again is the opposition between a superficial world of social convention and a subsurface one of unconscious will, physiological need and barbaric impulse. Again the narrative pattern is that of Shakespearean comedy—alienation from natural order (Rennie's Toronto career), followed by descent into a more primitive but healing reality (cancer and Caribbean violence), and finally some reestablishment of order (the concluding insight). Rennie, the point-of-view character, is another of the self-preoccupied female participants in intellectual Toronto that one encounters in The Edible Woman, Surfacing and Lady Oracle; although carrying a different history, she has the same general vocabulary, ironic wit and speech patterns of the earlier characters….
Atwood has consistently used the human body as a metaphor for surface and depth; concern for the skin as in Anna's make-up in Surfacing, Joan's weight-loss in Lady Oracle, Rennie's fashion stories here in Bodily Harm, have stood for repression of organic reality. The body itself has stood for that reality, refusing to eat in The Edible Woman, being stripped of make-up and clothing to reveal itself in Surfacing, and here asserting its mortal flesh and blood nature through Rennie's cancer.
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