Margaret Atwood, the Canadian novelist, has one of current fiction's more detached voices. Her tone toward her characters reflects the nature of the characters themselves: women who are divided into separate personae—one half defined by the role they feel society has thrust upon them, the other, their true self (insecure and amorphous as it is) trying to break out. Like many other characters in recent fiction, their lives are directionless; they drift in and out of relationships and find little satisfaction in work. Atwood doesn't treat them as whole persons, but rather as fragmented parts of a human being. Consequently, it's often difficult for the reader to gather much sympathy for them—they're too much the victims of every current neurosis. Her last novel, Life Before Man, examined the lives of three narcissistic, shallow individuals; although the novel progressed along a linear time span, and set out to analyze the characters' changing over time, we saw almost no change in their lives, and little of redeeming value to justify such a detailed presentation of their neuroses.
But in Bodily Harm, her most recent novel, by placing Rennie Wilford, her protagonist, on a Caribbean island in the throes of revolution, and adding a scare with cancer to her life, Atwood has, in a sense, saved Rennie from the stagnant fate of her other novels' characters. The stakes are higher; survival, one of Atwood's favorite themes, is no longer a 1970s term tossed around at cocktail parties. Death, rather than the modern sense of ennui, threatens Rennie and the people around her, and ultimately gives her life a meaning she hadn't known before….
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