Sunday 30 October 2011

Books: Read as alternative to Bridget Jones's Diary

Bodily Harm
By Margaret Atwood
This is my second book my Margaret Atwood, the first being The Handmaid’s Tale.  This one is quite different to that one, as I felt The Handmaid’s Tale was trying to make statements about women, society, all that jazz, whereas I think this one was just like a quite good story, without any definite ‘stance’ or message.  There’s nowt wrong with that though, it was good.
  Basically, it was about this woman called Rennie (naming the main character after an indigestion tablet, cheeky).  She is a single woman, having broken up with her long term partner Jake after she had breast cancer and subsequent mastectomy.  She also fell in love with her surgeon.  She is a freelance ‘lifestyle’ writer, and she manages to get sent to a small Carribbean island, St Agathe, on a travel assignment.  While hanging out there, she meets a few characters, firstly Dr Minnow, who is a sort of politician, then Paul, a man who is assumed to be CIA, but turns out to be ‘the connection’ in a guns and drug smuggling cartel, and my favourite, Lora, who is a random woman who provides many a monologue about her weird life. 
  The political situation on St Agathe escalates to the stage where Dr Minnow gets assassinated, and Rennie and Lora are imprisoned as they are connected to him.  She eventually goes home at the end, the final scene is her on the plane home, although because of the tense it is written in, (it says ‘this is what will happen’ rather than ‘this is what happened’ – I’m sure there is a posh name for this but I don’t know what it is), you don’t know whether she actually goes home, or whether she is just imagining what it will be like to go home from her prison cell.
  I like it because Rennie is a totally independent woman.  She has no man, and she goes to St Agathe alone.  She encounters amazing things there, sees incredible horrors and experiences an entirely different culture, but the way it is written suggests that to her, this is not that unusual.  She seems to fit in easily, and finds it all interesting, although largely commonplace.  This suggests to me that living the life of an independent woman can be hard, but totally worth it for the value of the interesting experiences she has had while not sat at home on the sofa with some bloke.  Therefore, I feel that in a way, it glamorises the life of an independent single woman, which is something that 21st century society fails to do on a spectacular level.  

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