"Life of Pi" by Yann Martel

I read this winner of the 2002 Booker Prize nearly twenty years ago and I had remember it mostly as the story of survival following a shipwreck with a funny joke about religion. I have more recently seen the National Theatre production (see below the byline). But rereading it I realised what an incredibly well-written book it is.

It's beautifully paced with a four-part structure:

• The first quarter of the book is concerned with Pi's childhood in Pondicherry, the ethics of zoo-keeping, and his discovery of religions (culminating in the moment I had remembered when a priest, an imam and a pandit converge on him in the street. The turning point is when the family sell their zoo and begin their voyage, with animals, across the Pacific. And the ship sinks.
• The second part of the book concerns Pi's survival as the hyena devours the zebra and kills the orang utan and then the tiger kills the hyena. The turning point comes when Pi realises that if he is to survive, he will have to tame the tiger.
• The third part of the book is the battle for survival. The turning point comes when he goes blind and encounters another blind ship-wrecked sailor (French, a food expert) who, however, is killed by the tiger.
• In the fourth part of the book he regains his sight and lands on a floating island, full of mysteries which he later has to abandon. At the 90% mark he reaches land. Then he is interviewed by Japanese salvage experts who suggest that his story cannot be true. He offers them an alternative. 

That twist in the end is very clever. Suddenly, the reader realises that the yarn spun may not be true. But it was so well told, that it seemed true.

And there is a frame. Some of the chapters, italicised, purport to be the author interviewing the real-life hero of the Life. This technique adds verisimilitude. It culminates in Pi scoffing at those who disbelieve his story on the grounds that no tiger was found in Mexico: “And they expected to find - ha! In the middle of a Mexican tropical jungle, imagine! Ha! Ha! It's laughable, simply laughable. What were they thinking?” (Ch 11) This is the author teasing our understanding of reality. Even if we don't believe Pi's tale, we are still tempted to believe that he exists.

My friend Michele Tracy was most interested by the religious aspects of the story.

• Her starting point is that in the frame story, the narrator Pi tells the author "I have a story that will make you believe in God."
• She also points out that the name of the ship that sinks, the Tsimtsum, is also the (Jewish) idea that God withdrew or contracted his infinite light in order to create the universe. This left “empty space” for the cosmos and for free will. The ship's sinking can then be compared to God withdrawing, leaving Pi alone to become an independent person with a strong faith.
• She further speculates that the lifeboat with tiger is Hell, that the carnivorous island might be Purgatory, and that Mexico is Heaven, making Pi's voyage a Dantesque one.
• Finally she believes that the main message in the book is that life can and will be difficult, but that people must persevere by any means necessary.

There are some wonderful descriptions:

• After drinking water following severe dehydration: “Blood started flowing through my veins like cars from a wedding party honking their way through town.” (Ch 51)
• Lightning at sea: “For two, perhaps three seconds, a gigantic, blinding white shard of glass from a broken cosmic window danced in the sky.” (Ch 85)

Selected quotes: 

• “Reason, that fool’s gold for the bright.” (Ch 1)
• “In many ways, running a zoom is a hotelkeeper's worst nightmare ... the guests never leave their rooms; they expect not only lodging but full board; they receive a constant flow of visitors, some of whom are noisy and unruly. ... There is much cleaning to do, for the guests are as unhygienic as alcoholics ... Each guest is very particular about his or her diet ...To speak frankly, many are sexual deviants ... regularly affronting management with gross outrages of free sex and incest.” (Ch 4)
• “Animals in the wild live lives of compulsion and necessity within an unforgiving social hierarchy in an environment where thes supply of fear is high and the supply of food low and where territory must constantly be defended and parasites forever endured. What is the meaning of freedom in such a context?” (Ch 4)
• “To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.” (Ch 7)
• “What is the Ramayana but the account of one long, bad day for Rama?” (Ch 17)
• “If God on the cross is God shamming a human tragedy, it turns the Passion of Christ into the Farce of Christ.” (Ch 14)
• “Our encounters always leave me weary of the glum contentment that characterizes my life.” (Ch 21)
• “Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer?” (Ch 37)
• “Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness - how can I not dwell on this brief, cramped view of things? This peephole is all I've got!” (Ch 60)

October 2025; 319 pages

First published by Knopf in Canada in 2001

My paperback edition issued by Canongate Books in 2018

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

National Theatre production of 'Life of Pi'
I saw the National Theatre production of ‘Life of Pi’ on 30th March 2023 screened live to the Beacon cinema, Eastbourne.

I hadn’t really understood the book and I was initially sceptical about a play with puppets. I mean, puppets! I had heard of the NT production of Equus, using puppet horses but I had seen the production of Equus at the Theatre Royal Stratford (Saturday 23rd March 2019, matinee) and in this a male actor, Ira Mandela Siobhan, wearing only shorts bent forward slightly and stuck his arms in from of him as though they were the stiff forelegs of a horse and moved his body so that I believed he was a horse. Somehow he could manage to ripple his muscles in the way that you can see shivers running through a horses flanks; somehow he twitched and shyed and nuzzled exactly like a horse. It was perhaps the most remarkable purely physical performance I have ever seen any actor give; the first time I have experienced the production’s best performance be one entirely without words. So I doubted that puppets (one up from the masks of a Greek chorus) would be good enough for the suspension of disbelief that I need to fully immerse myself in the experience.

And, indeed, at first I was too concerned with the mechanics. They were distracting. I was reminded of when I took my stepson Paul to the Jorvik centre in York. He must have been about thirteen or fourteen, a young lad with a scientific bent. We sat in a carriage which moved around the exhibits on some sort of rail, stopping and starting, and he spent most of his time trying to work out how the thing worked rather than enjoying the show. That’s how I was at the start of this play.

But by the end of the first half, when the animals fought on the boat, I was so involved that I felt squeamish when the hyena disembowelled the Zebra, and distressed when it tore the throat out of the Orangutan. So. It worked. And the staging was equally brilliant. A boat rose from the floor of the stage. The storm, in which water came aboard the ship, was done with lights. When Pi went overboard and was drowning he was carried by stagehands and it really felt as if was sinking through the water as puppet fish swarmed around him. The whole thing was stunning. Truly immersive. Wow.

As for the lead actor himself, Hiran Abeysekera, he was amazing. He was on stage all the time, in what was often a very physical performance (he must have incredible stamina and agility) and he delivered some very funny lines with a deadpan wide-eyed innocence; it was a stupendous performance.

A great evening.

"The Blind Assassin" by Margaret Atwood

 Ten days after the second world war ended, Laura (who became a famous novelist posthumously) drove off a bridge. Shortly afterwards her brother-in-law is found dead. Decades later, his wife, Laura's sister (named Iris, in an acknowledged tribute to the role Iris plays in the death of Dido as recounted in the Aeneid) writes her memoirs. 

The book is made of three main narrative strands (interspersed with occasional newspaper articles): the present day in which the old woman describes herself and her declining health and her intention to create a record of what happened, the memoirs themselves going back to the time the sisters were little, and the repeated visits of an unnamed woman to an unnamed man during which they make love and he tells her a speculative fiction fantasy about a Blind Assassin and a voiceless slave girl (another unsubtle metaphor; the Assassin lost his sight through overwork and the female cannot speak for herself). Of course, the challenge is to correctly identify this couple and to work out why Laura committed suicide. 

The book is superb in its evocation of the sisters' childhood and even better at the description of the perils and tribulations of old age. There are a huge number of thought-provoking asides. Where it is less successful is in the antagonists: Richard and his formidable sister Winifred, a pair of pantomime villains with no discernible redeeming features. And, in the end, I was uncertain as to why Laura committed suicide: was it bereavement, sibling jealousy or the feeling that she had been betrayed (though one could argue that she had been doing her fair share of betraying)? Since the whole book has been written to provide an explanation for the suicide, my uncertainty is problematic.

Nevertheless, there is a great deal to treasure. It is beautifully written and the careful interweaving of the narratives is masterful. It won the Booker Prize in 2000 and was nominated for the Women's Prize in Fiction in 2001. But it's not my favourite Atwood.

For all its current following, the original reviews were mixed. The New York Times called it "overlong and badly written" (I can't agree with 'badly written'), the Guardian asserted that "it falls short of making the emotional impact that its suggestive and slippery plot at times promises."

Pacing:

• The love interest in the main 'memoir' narrative is introduced one-third of the way through. 
• The narrator gets engaged to the villain at 44%
• The affair comes to an end at 70%

Selected quotes:

There are wonderful descriptions:

• "The orange tulips are coming out, crumpled and raggedy like the stragglers from some returning army." (III: The silver box)
• "The summer heat has come in earnest, settling down over the town like cream soup. ... The paper is damp under my fingers, the words I write feather at the edges like lipstick on an aging mouth. Just climbing the stairs I sprout a thin moustache of sweat." (III: The button factory)
• "Under the street lights my foreshortened shadow slid before me like a goblin." (V: The fur coat)
• "Her face is a blur, like a pigeon smashing into glass." (V: The tango)
• "The pen is heavy, hard to push, like a nail scratching on cement." (VII: Xanadu)

There are characters summed up in a single line:

• "He doesn't know everything, though that would be news to him." (III: The button factory)
• "He's a man for whom chewing is a form of thinking." (VII: The eggshell hat)
• "They were new money, without a doubt: so new it shrieked. Their clothes looked as if they'd covered themselves in glue, then rolled around in hundred-dollar bills." (V: The tango)
• "She held the hoops, others jumped through them." (VIII: Xanadu)
• "His nurse, a chemical redhead with a mouth that flaps at both ends." (IX: The laundry)

There are other insights into life:

• "She had her reasons. Not that they were ever the same as anybody else's reasons. She was completely ruthless in that way." (I: The bridge)
• "Then the school chaplain offered a prayer, lecturing God on the many unprecedented challenges that face today's young people. God must have heard this sort of thing before, he's probably as bored with it as the rest of us." (III: The presentation)
• "As close to suicide as damn is to swearing" (III: The presentation)
• "Reenie never went in much for God. There was mutual respect, and if you were in trouble naturally you'd call on him, as with lawyers; but as with lawyers, it would have to be bad trouble." (III: The button factory)
• "The nineteenth-century type of Medusa, with a lovely impervious gaze, the snakes writhing up out of her head like anguished thoughts." (III: Avilion)
• "Thousands have drowned. Global warming is held accountable: people must stop burning things up, it is said. Gasoline, oil, whole forests. But they won't stop. Greed and hunger lash them on, as usual." (III: The gramophone)
• "He was still a gentleman in his own view, or he held on to the shreds of the costume." (III: The gramophone)
• "Candle stubs have been found, and burned spoons, and the odd throwaway needle. ... Vice is everywhere, it seems. Et in Arcadia Ego." (V: The button factory picnic)
• "You don't teach boys to be charming. It makes people think they are devious." (V: The Arcadian court)
• "Never any paintings called Men Washing Socks in Sink." (V: The Blind Assassin : Street walk)
• "After having imposed itself on us like the egomaniac it is, clamouring about its own needs, foisting upon us its own sordid and perilous desires, the body's final trick is simply to absent itself." (VII: The eggshell hat)
• "My job was to open my legs and shut my mouth." (VII: Xanadu)
• "Things have gone pretty far when you've come to feel that it's your utensils that are taking care of you and not the other way around." (IX: The laundry)
• "Could it be that Myra is my designated guardian angel? Or is she instead a foretaste of purgatory? And how do you tell the difference?" (IX: The Water Nixie)
• "But why bother about the end of the world? It's the end of the world every day, for someone. Time rises and rises, and when it reaches the level of your eyes you drown." (XII: Home fires)
• "Overnight, whole portions of what had previously been acknowledged as reality simply vanished. This is what happens when there's a war." (XII: Home fires)

Margaret Atwood also wrote (reviewed in this blog):

• Bodily Harm
• Oryx and Crake
• Hag-Seed
• The Handmaid's Tale
• The Heart Goes Last

January 2023; 635 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Rebel Angels" by Robertson Davies

 A group of academics in a Canadian university squabble over missing manuscripts, philosophy, and a half-gypsy research student.

The blurb says this novel is "a glittering extravaganza of wit, scatology, saturnalia, mysticism and erudite vaudeville". I thought it was quite pedestrian. What do I know? It was noiminated by author Anthony Burgess as one of his 99 best novels since 1939.

Selected quotes:

• "He seemed to me to have more conscience than is good for any man." (NA2.1)
• "Those who can get beyond the fashionable learning of their day are few." (NA2.2)
• "One begins with no knowledge except that what one is doing is probably wrong." (NA2.3)
• "Religion and humour, two realms in which humour seems to be wholly out of place" (NA2.3)
• "His idea of compassion was allowing every indefensible statement to pass unchallenged." 
• (SP3.1)
• "Bowel movement is a real creation" (NA3.3)
• "It is not tactful in these days to ask about the wives of one's friends too particularly, in case they are wives no longer." (NA3.3)
• "I must be modern: I live now. But like everybody else ... I live in a muddle of eras, and some of my ideas belong to today, and some to an ancient past, and some to periods of time that seem more relevant to my parents than to me." (SP4.1)
• "An ageing romantic is hardly to be distinguished from an ageing Tory." (SP4.1)
• "The gods themselves struggle vainly with stupidity." (NA4.2) This is a quote from Schiller; it also comes into The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing.
• "Intelligent societies have always preserved their wise men in institutions of one kind or another, where their chief business is to be wise, to conserve the fruits of wisdom and to add to them if they can." (NA4.2)
• "Who will smooth the pillow when you lie at the hour of death?" (NA4.3)
• "What is the root of man? ... the deepest root of all, the tap-root, is that child he once was." (SP5.1)
• "How much more complicated life is than the attainment of a PhD would lead one to believe." (SP5.4)
• "the Rebel Angels ... were real angels, Samahazai and Azazel, and they betrayed the secrets of Heaven to King Solomon, and God threw them out of Heaven ... they came to earth and taught tongues, and healing and laws and hygiene ... and they were often special successes with 'the daughters of men'." (NA5.5)
• "She led a dog's life, and it made her disagreeable, which she mistook for being strong."  (NA5.6)
• "The word glamour has been so battered and smeared that almost everybody has forgotten that it means magic and enchantment." (SP6.3)
• "It was one of those houses stiff with Good Taste." (SP6.5)
• "I have had too much experience of life to attempt to tell a really rich person anything. They are as bad as the young; they know it all." (NA6.1)
• "To marry, he said, was to take a hand in a dangerous game where the stakes are the highest - a fuller life or a life diminished and confined. It was a game for adult players." (NA6.2)
• "De mortuis nil nisi hokum" (NA6.3) The standard quote is de mortuis nil nisi bonum which mean {speak) nothing but good about the dead.

March 2022; 332 pages

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

 

"Eleanor Rigby" by Douglas Coupland

 Liz is single, in her forties and lonely. Her story is about seven years ago when she was in her late thirties and single and lonely and discovered the son she had when she was sixteen and gave away for adoption. He undermines all the defences she erected as a single, lonely person. He is a charming person who has mystical visions, talks about his multiple dreadful foster families, and can sing songs backwards. And he is dying of MS.

Jeremy is an original character who grabs your attention as soon as he appears. As for Liz, his mother, she is a magnet for disaster, finding a dead body when she is still a child. These two power the novel.

As original and thought-provoking as Shampoo Planet (and Coupland also wrote Generation X). 

Memorable moments:

• "I'd been sieving the contents of my days with ever finer mesh, trying to sort out those sharp and nasty bits that were causing me grief" (p 3)
• "The clinic ... an architectural version of myself ... it was cool and smelled of sanitation products." (p 7)
• "Loneliness is ... the gun that shoots the bullets that make is dance on a saloon floor and humiliate ourselves in front of strangers." (p 9)
• "My relief after they had gone was akin to unzipping my pants after a huge meal." (p 28)
• "'When was the last time you ate?' 'As in food?' 'No, as in tractors. Of course I mean food.'" (p 40)
• "Visiting another country is really just the same as going into someone's house to soak up its aura." (p 66)
• "He was the wonderful Christmas present, and I was merely the box, the wrapping paper, and the postage stamp." (p 97)
• "What if God exists but he doesn't really like people very much?" (p 139)
• "If our subconscious was attractive, we wouldn't have to bury it down deep inside ourselves. It'd just be another feature on our face, like our nose." (p 205)

A funny, moving and profound novel. April 2021; 249 pages

This review was written by
the author of Motherdarling

"Bodily Harm" by Margaret Atwood

At the beginning Rennie, a globe trotting journalist, has had surgery for a lump in her breast; her boyfriend Jake has left; someone apparently intending to assault her has broken into her flat. Which is quite a beginning.

Seeking to escape she takes an assignment to do a travel piece on an impoverished Caribbean island. This began to remind me of Graham Greene at his very best. The airport is run down and the hotel is shabby. Everyone she meets seems to have a sinister agenda. The police are corrupt and there is an impending election; one of the major industries is drug smuggling; the hurricane relief money lines the pockets of the politicians. The descriptions are brilliant, the characters perfect.

• "Less like a background ... than a subground, something that can't be seen but is nevertheless there, full of gritty old rocks and buried stumps, worms and bones; nothing you'd want to go into." (p 18)
• "Those who'd lately been clamouring for roots had never seen a root up close ... she'd rather be some other part of the plant." (p 18)
• "In Griswold everyone gets what they deserve. In Griswold everyone deserves the worst." (p 18)
• "She didn't want to die with dignity. She didn't want to die at all." (p 20)
• "Pick a man, any man, and find the distinguishing features. They eyebrows? The nose? The body?" (p 44)
• "The standard aimed at was not beauty but decency ... If you were a girl it was a lot safer to be decent than to be beautiful." (pp 54 - 55)
• "You're turning me on. ... I thought you were on all the time."
• "Being in love was like running barefoot along a street covered with broken bottles. It was foolhardy, and if you got through it without damage it was only by sheer luck. It was like taking your clothes off at lunchtime in the bank. It let people think they knew something about you that you didn't know about them, it gave them power over you. It made you visible, soft, penetrable; it made you ludicrous." (p 102)
• "She doesn't like the sign of ravage, damage, the edge between inside and outside blurred like that." (p 85)
• "'I'm an animal in the dark.' 'Which one ... A chipmunk?'" (p 117)
• "I personally think it's just dandy when people can't express anger, there's enough of it in the world already." (p 165)
• "He did make his living cutting parts off other people's bodies and patting their shoulders while they died, he used the same hands for both." (pp 196 - 197)
• "'But up and coming' ... 'As often as possible', said Jake." (p 200)
• "Nobody wants it [the drug trade] legalized, then you could grow it right there in your own back yard, the bottom would fall out of the market." (p 216)
• "Love is tangled, sex is straight." (p 223)
• "I'd like to fly like a bird but I never jumped off any roofs." (p 266)

Rennie has had surgery resulting in removal pf part of her body. Throughout the book, Rennie sees bits of body that seem to have become detached:

• "His fingers were around her wrist. She did not see his hands but an odd growth, like a plant or something with tentacles, detachable." (p 32)
• "My hands, she said. I've left them somewhere and now I can't find them. She was holding her hands in the air, helplessly, as if she couldn't move them.   They're right there, I said. On the ends of your arms.    No, no, she said impatiently. Not those, those are no good any more. My other hands, the ones I had before, the ones I touch things with." (p 57)
• "She realises she's stepped over a pair of legs, trousers with bare feet at the end." (p 68)
• "She thinks briefly of his feet, stifled in humid leather." (p 76)
• "Without his eyes his face is expressionless, he's a faceless stranger. She's aware of his arm lying across the back of the seat." (p 98)
• "It's her hands she's looking for, she knows she left them here somewhere, folded neatly in a drawer, like gloves." (p 116)
• "Afterwards she could feel the shape of his hand for hours." (p 144)
• "Fragmentation, dismemberment, this is what he sees when he looks at her." (p 258)

Wonderful. June 2017; 301 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Books by Margaret Atwood reviewed in this blog:

• The Heart Goes Last: a homeless couple enter a utopian community
• Bodily Harm: A wonderful Graham Greenesque excursion to a Caribbean island where no one is who they seem to be
• Oryx and Crake: adventures in a world post climate change
• Hag-Seed: a brilliant retelling of the Tempest, re enacted in a prison
• The Handmaid's Tale: the one that everyone raves about ... but not her best.
• The Blind Assassin: an elderly lady remembers the tragedy of her sister (which features a lady called Reenie, rather than Rennie)

"The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman" by Denis Theriault

Bilodo (ironically nicknamed Libido by his friend and colleague, the wonderfully dissolute Robert) is a postman whose solitary life is enlivened by steaming open letters and reading them before delivering them. Grandpre is exchanging haikus with Segolene in Guadeloupe. When Grandpre dies in front of his eyes, Bilodo is distraught; this fascinating correspondence must come to an end. Unless ...

This is a wonderful magical book. Not only does it explore the haiku and its five-lined big brother the tanka, and many other aspects of Japanese culture, but it has moments of lyricism and many laugh aloud witticisms.

• "If at the Olympic Games there had been a stair-scaling event, Bilodo would have stood an excellent chance of qualifying, perhaps even of mounting the ultimate, glorious top step of the podium." (p 7)
• "He wouldn't have wanted to swap places with anyone in the world. Except perhaps with another postman." (p 9)
• "The guys at that publishing house were obviously asleep at the wheel." (p 66)
• "He who had never hot a fly without regretting that he couldn't give it an anaesthetic first had just hit his best friend. His ex-friend that is." (p 73)
• "The situation hadn't only overtaken him - it now had a one-lap lead." (p 76)
• "So icy she could have sunk a dozen Titanics." (p 78)

Brilliant and wonderful. June 2017; 1208 pages

"Hag-Seed" by Margaret Atwood

Felix Phillips is ousted as Artistic director of a Theatre festival by his right-hand man and swears revenge. Driven into theatrical exile he gets a job as teacher on a drama course at a prison. Then, as he and his prisoners prepare a production of The Tempest, the Minister for Justice and others in his retinue pay a visit to the prison. And real life events seem to match the events on stage step by step.

This is an ingenious and beautifully written update version of Shakespeare's classic. It also manages to be a brilliant critique of the play:

• "Everyone loved the fight scenes: that's why Shakespeare put them in." (p 58)
• "The optimistic characters are stakeholders in the more positive side of human nature, the pessimistic characters in the more negative side." (p 259)

I love Atwood's work. Here we have genius:

• Her description of the smell of the prison: "Unfresh paint, faint mildew, unloved food eaten in boredom, and the smell of dejection, the shoulders slumping down, the head bowed, the body caving in upon itself. A meagre smell. Onion farts. Cold naked feet, damp towels, motherless years." (pp 74 - 75) Motherless years makes me want to weep.
• Her understanding of the fundamentals of humanity: "You know teenage girls, they desert their adored daddies the minute some young ripped stud heaves into view" (p 141)
• The joy of being alive: "Real life is brilliantly coloured ... It's made up of every possible hue, including those we can't see. All nature is a fire: everything forms, everything blossoms, everything fades. We are slow clouds ..." (p 178) Colourful philosophy.
• Appreciation of feminine beauty: "If he were their age he'd be leaning forward too. Actually, he is leaning forward." (p 256) Truth and humour entangled.

Books by Margaret Atwood reviewed in this blog:

• The Heart Goes Last: a homeless couple enter a utopian community
• Bodily Harm: A wonderful Graham Greenesque excursion to a Caribbean island where no one is who they seem to be
• Oryx and Crake: adventures in a world post climate change
• Hag-Seed: a brilliant retelling of the Tempest, re enacted in a prison
• The Handmaid's Tale: the one that everyone raves about ... but not her best.
• The Blind Assassin: an elderly lady remembers the tragedy of her sister

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood

Set in a near future after Christian fundamentalists have taken over a large part of the US and imposed a totalitarian patriarchal hierocracy, Offred (her name means Of Fred) is a 'handmaid', the scarlet and white clothed mistress of one of the powerful commanders. Her job is to provide lustless sex so that the commander can breed children because the birth rate has crashed, many women (never men according to the dogma of the patriarchy) are infertile and many children who are born are deformed and destroyed.

Atwood writes in a simple but lyrical style, delicately dropping breadcrumbs of information, never telling us more than we need for a moment, allowing us slowly to explore the parameters of the strange new world. The back story is always a problem in science fiction; the events that shape the dystopia must (?) be described but this can mean the narrative interrupts; Atwood solves this by doling out the information in tiny nibbles, waiting until over half way through before giving a larger chunk.

Her prose is beautiful, blemished only by those infantile neologisms which American commercial practice imposes on the world, thus there are BirthMobiles and Soul Scrolls and Compubanks and Pornomarts and Feels on Wheels vans and Bun-Dle Buggies.

The Commander's wife, Serena Joy, is an old lady, barren, trapped in a marriage, having achieved what she worked for but possibly not enjoying it now that it has arrived: "her face is sinking in upon itself, and I think of those towns built on underground rivers, where houses and whole streets disappear overnight."

What is beautiful about her writing is the way she can convey peace and despair and hopelessness in sentences of such pure simplicity. It is the way she uses words and very short sentences to comunicate. Simple. Stark. Elegant. Much better than this rubbish that praises her.

Some other gems:

• "A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women"; a point reinforced by mitochondrial DNA.
• "Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it."
• "at that time men and women tried each other on causally, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit"
• "July, its breathless days and sauna nights, hard to sleep"
• "Better never means better for everyone ... It always means worse, for some."
• "I am a blank here, between parentheses."

This book was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1986

A joy to read.

June 2016; 324 pages if you include the 'Historical Notes' which add nothing to a gem of a story and which I would recommend you not to read.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

I am not a usual reader of science fiction but technically this classifies, and as a dystopian vision. Other dystopian books I would recommend in this blog include:

• Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel although the big unanswered question is why the survivors of the plague would be so keen to preserve Beethoven and Shakespeare and so cavalier about preserving engineering and pysics; perhaps the virus attacked scientists preferentially
• The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins: book one is great, book two OK but book three is a real let down; don't bother
• The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick is said to be great by everyone but I was underwhelmed
• and of course Oryx and Crake, another brilliant novel from Atwood, post-apocalyptic rather than dystopian perhaps.

Books by Margaret Atwood reviewed in this blog:

• The Heart Goes Last: a homeless couple enter a utopian community
• Bodily Harm: A wonderful Graham Greenesque excursion to a Caribbean island where no one is who they seem to be
• Oryx and Crake: adventures in a world post climate change
• Hag-Seed: a brilliant retelling of the Tempest, re enacted in a prison
• The Handmaid's Tale: the one that everyone raves about ... but not her best.
• The Blind Assassin: a regretful memoir from an old lady, recalling her sister