Margaret Atwood has written a lot of books, and for me they fall into one of two camps: either I've read it, or I know nothing about it. Cat's Eye was one novel I only learnt about a few years ago. First I came across a quoted passage from it in another book - I want to say it was Queen Bees & Wannabes by Rosalind Wiseman, but I can't find it to be sure (my other option is Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose, but she doesn't cite it in her list of recommended reading so now I'm not sure where I saw it!), a passage that made me think "oh wow so that's what the book is about!" and then I read a review by a friend on Goodreads, Martine, which I really recommend. The two coincided close together and so I picked up a second-hand copy and then let it languish on my bookcase for another year or so, until I put it on my 2010 TBR Challenge. It took me nearly two months to read it, but I don't want that to put you off.But that's enough about that! I only mention it because it's bugging me that I can't remember where I read that passage that so appealed to me, and I want to give credit where credit's due. :)This is a story that will resonate deeply, but not exclusively, with women - particularly any woman who's experienced bullying, peer pressure, ostracism or frankly any woman who has had girl friends! At the same time, I heartily recommend it to men to read, especially if you want to get a glimpse into the world of female friendships and try to understand them - though I don't blame you if this only leaves you more confused: I get it and yet at the same time I'm amazed at it myself, because on so many levels it doesn't make sense. But I'll come to that later (and like most of my reviews, it will get personal to a degree).Elaine Risley doesn't call herself an artist, she calls herself a painter; nevertheless, she's known success, and now in her fifties, she has returned to Toronto from Vancouver where she lives with her second husband, Ben, to support a retrospective of her controversial work. Put on a pedestal of feminism by some, Elaine cares nothing for whatever movement is popular in the day, and inwardly laughs at the things people read into her work. To her, her paintings capture years of repressed emotion, fear and anger uppermost among them - as well as a kind of history of her life.Being back in Toronto, memories come rushing back to her, and she expects to see her old best friend, Cordelia, in every woman's face that she sees on the street. She imagines what Cordelia could be like now, where she might be - going so far to picture her in an iron lung. The not knowing, and almost-fear of bumping into Cordelia, makes Elaine tense and in the grip of anticipation. She hates Toronto, and it brings back a lot of memories.She remembers, back in the early 40s, travelling around the countryside with her family - her scientist father, her mother, her older brother Stephen - in their car, camping and staying in motels while her dad collected caterpillar specimens. When Elaine is eight, the family moves to one of the new suburbs of Toronto, and for the first time Elaine and her brother go to school. Stephen has no trouble fitting in and making friends, but Elaine is a more quiet and reserved child. She makes friends with a girl called Carol, and later a girl a year older called Grace, who often dictates the kind of things they do when they play together. Elaine is introduced into a girlie world she never knew about before and isn't all that comfortable with, but it's not until Cordelia, the same age as Grace, comes to the school and joins their group that she's made to feel less.It begins one Christmas, and Elaine doesn't know why, and doesn't even try to understand. It just did. Singled out for punishment, the other girls exercise their discovery of their own growing power by ganging up on Elaine, ridiculing her, watching her, reporting on her to each other, criticising her, making her feel wrong no matter what she does. She keeps quiet about it and develops her own unhealthy coping mechanisms: self-mutilation and vomiting at will, until the day she realises that they only have power over her for as long as she lets them.But while she never sees Grace or Carol again, Cordelia comes back into her life later and the two, despite the past - which they never discuss - become best friends. Over time, Cordelia drops in and out of Elaine's life, a kind of phantom she can never exorcise - which would involve speaking the truth, and asking why? Cat's Eye tells Elaine's story, from when she's eight up to the "present", following her career, her two marriages, and her move to Vancouver. But it's clear the focus is on those few pivotal years of primary school, and the long-lasting impact they had on shaping Elaine as a person, a woman, her personality and her decisions. It is one of the most powerful novels you're likely to read, drawing you deep into Elaine's past and present psyche - and the two voices, Elaine in the past and Elaine in the present, are so skilfully written, you get distinct voices that are at the same time clearly the same person, at different stages in life. And Atwood makes it look so easy.What's particularly powerful about the novel is the atmosphere that is created with every word. You can smell it, breathe it in, live it, because it engages the familiar, triggering your own memories of like places and people. The descriptions of 40s and 50s Toronto didn't speak to me because I lived here at that time - I wasn't even born then - but I've been in those lounge rooms, ones trapped in the 50s or a later period, that have that distinct smell; that cream-beige-brown colour scheme, or mustard-yellow; the furniture with tapered spindly legs; the old TVs in cabinets; the dowdy women's dresses and the panty-hose that sagged at the knee.Mrs Smeath is standing at the kitchen sink in her bib apron. She's finished her nap and now she's upright, getting supper. She's peeling potatoes; she often peels things. The peel falls from her large knuckly hands in a long pale spiral. The paring knife she uses is worn so thin its blade is barely more than a crescent moon sliver. The kitchen is steamy, and smells of marrow fat and stewing bones. (p.100)Elaine wasn't the only one fascinated with Mrs Smeath, Grace's mother - I felt compelled to stare and study her too, and the way she treated Elaine made me seethe. Small-minded, the kind of religious person who doesn't really understand the teachings of their religion because of how they've interpreted them, she's a well-meaning evil person. And yet, she represents the kind of obstacle that can help shape a person - she becomes Elaine's muse, the figure she paints the most. By painting her almost obsessively, her hate takes form and shape and then changes into something, I think, more healthy for Elaine. Art as a means not just of expressing yourself but as a kind of therapy (horrible word I know, but hopefully you get what I mean).The school is a more alien place, because schools have changed so much, but it fits all the descriptions our grandparents have shared with us over the years, or the movies we've seen - but, seen through the eyes of a child with a sophisticated voice like Elaine, it seems somehow more real. The school building itself is old and tall, made of liver-colored brick, with high ceilings, long ominous wood-floored hallways, and radiators that are either on full blast or not on at all, so that we're either shivering with cold or too hot. The windows are high and thin and many-paned, and decorated with cutouts made of construction paper; right now there are snowflakes, for winter. There's a front door which is never used by children. At the back are two grandiose entranceways with carvings around them and ornate insets above the doors, inscribed in curvy, solemn lettering: GIRLS and BOYS. When the teacher in the yard rings her brass handbell we have to line up in twos by the classrooms, girls in one line, boys in another, and file into our separate doors. The girls hold hands; the boys don't. If you go in the wrong door you get the strap, or so everyone says. (pp. 48-9)On a side note, the Toronto Public Library near where I live - or one of them, anyway - is in a lovely old building which has, down the side, doors like these: "grandiose" entrances marked "GIRLS" and "BOYS" - I had always thought, maybe they were to do with bathrooms, but now I know better.The schoolroom is high-ceilinged, yellowy-brown, with blackboards at the front and along one side and tall many-paned windows above the radiators on the other side. Over the door to the cloakroom, so that you feel you're being watched from behind, there's a large photograph of the King and Queen, the King with medals, the Queen in a white ballgown and diamond tiara. High wooden desks that sit two, with slanted tops and holes for inkwells, are arranged in rows. It's like all the other classrooms at Queen Mary [Public School], but it seems darker, possibly becaue there's less decoration. (p.83)It reminds me of when, in primary school, we made the obligatory school field trip to Hagley Farm Primary School, two country towns over, which aside from being a farm school also has a replica of an "olde times" schoolroom, where we would sit for a replica lesson taught by a scary woman who was very good at playing the part - complete with wooden ruler which would have been used to smack palms. As it was, we got punishments like sitting in the corner wearing a dunce's hat, or putting our noses to a chalk dot on the board - a bit hard to not giggle at that one! I remember feeling intimidated, even though it wasn't really real, and scared of making a mistake. Which I did: I said the Union Jack was called the English flag, or something - I was so proud of knowing the answer, and then it turned out to be wrong! I can't remember what my punishment was, but it was probably the dunce hat, which was a tall pointy white paper hat with the word "dunce" on it. Rather like being called a "loser" today methinks. I was often reminded, especially in the chapters dealing with Elaine's childhood, of Janet Frame. Frame is a famous New Zealand writer, and when I was a teenager I watched the mini-series An Angel at My Table on the ABC, which is the story of Janet's childhood and early adulthood. It's at times scary, often depressing, very vivid and really sticks in your head - not least because, being a shy, withdrawn and completely unconfident person, she was diagnosed with depression, locked up in a mental institute and given electric shock treatment. At times Elaine made me so anxious and worried, her inability to stand up for herself especially, that I worried what would happen. And here's the thing, with girl-bullying: not only is it psychological, but it's also subtle. While it can and does deteriorate into obvious name-calling, taunts, physical abuse and worse, at its most dangerous it sounds, if put into words, almost petty and trivial. Those who have experienced it would I think agree with me: this kind of bullying is the worst kind. The other, being more obvious, feels more easily tackled, more validated somehow. It's like, when someone gets a sprained ankle, you might say, "oh it's just a sprain" whereas a broken ankle seems more serious and is taken more seriously - well a sprained ankle can be considered worse than a broken ankle, which if a clean break is easily mended: a sprain can do long-lasting damage to the joint, the ligament, the tendons, and weakens the joint. Subtle bullying is like that, but it's generally the more obvious, broken-ankle-type of bullying that we think is serious and, being more visible, something we can stop.The bullying Elaine endures is definitely the more subtle, psychological kind. Her three friends create a nightmare world for her, one in which she doesn't understand the rules, has no hope of controlling or changing, and ends up in a kind of limbo state.Grace is waiting there and Carol, and especially Cordelia. Once I'm outside the house there is no getting away from them. They are on the school bus, where Cordelia stands close beside me and whispers in my ear: "Stand up straight! People are looking!" Carol is in my classroom, and it's her job to report to Cordelia what I do and say all day. They're there at recess, and in the cellar at lunchtime. They comment on the kind of lunch I have, how I hold my sandwich, how I chew. On the way home from school I have to walk in front of them, or behind. In front is worse because they talk about how I'm walking, how I look from behind. "Don't hunch over," says Cordelia. "Don't move your arms like that."They don't say any of the things they say to me in front of others, even other children: whatever is going on is going on in secret, among the four of us only. Secrecy is important, I know that: to violate it would be the greatest, the irreparable sin. If I tell I will be cast out forever. (p.127) Naturally, these scenes brought to mind my own experiences - and makes me wonder, if the kids who bullied me would also have memories of being bullied? Not that I could ask, but it makes me curious whether they too remember themselves as victims, or understand that they were the victimiser? [I have removed the next few paragraphs because Goodreads allows reviews to be only so long; if you're really interested in hearing about my personal experiences with bullying, you're welcome to read the review on my blog, Giraffe Days.]While Elaine's childhood is arguably the most interesting and scary part of the novel, it's only half of it. The story does not lag in the second half, but takes on a new tone and dimension, a shift in atmosphere. Elaine's personality shifts too as she grows and matures, yet the after-effects of being abused as a child linger, and she falls into relationships that aren't all that healthy. You can see a parallel between children staying with "friends" who are in fact bullies (I wonder if the statistics would look like rape statistics: the majority of bullies are actually friends), and adult women staying in abusive relationships with men. I can see a parallel, that's for sure.While I marvel at Atwood's skill with words, her ability to create such a vivid world and characters, I did often find Elaine's sophisticated voice as a child unrealistic - she has an artistic, very mature way with words - especially considering it's not set up as adult-Elaine telling a story - adult Elaine has forgotten many of the things that child-Elaine reveals to us. I've also had a bit of an overdose on present tense in books lately, and am getting rather sick of it. Not Atwood's fault, no, but I'm not always convinced it's the right tense to use. Cat's Eye moves back and forth in time continuously, and not always chronologically, and it's all in present tense, which gives it a condensed, squashed feel, rather like holding the fat, solid book between my hands and pressing inwards so that there's no air in there. I felt myself floundering a bit at times, and the present and the past blurred together - which you could say is apt, in that we never really leave our childhood behind do we: we may forget the details, or some scenes, but the imprint is always there. So while it didn't make it all that easy to read, I can appreciate the artistic effect.The other thing I'll comment on, is how nice it was to read a book set in a Canadian city, which doesn't try to hide the fact. I find that Canadian and Australian authors tend to avoid locating their novels in an easily identifiable place, opting for never naming the setting or inventing a new one - compared to American authors who have made places famous through their novels. While I love the vague settings of the former, I have to say that it's fun to read a book set in Toronto, where I'm currently living, and to recognise street names, landmarks (the ones still around anyway), and to try to guess which suburb young Elaine first lived in. I wouldn't mind more such stories, instead of having them Americanised (this is a major pet peeve of mine that crops up in reviews and blog posts from time to time).All said, Cat's Eye is quite the achievement, in parts scary, or sad, or funny, or insightful, and telling the story of a character who feel very very real and very familiar. It's not a book you'll forget in a hurry.
What it's about"We are survivors of each other. We have been shark to one another, but also lifeboat. That counts for something." The power of abusive friendships and relationships is the theme of this book, though not all the relationships are tainted, so it's not depressing and at times it's quite amusing (e.g. discerning the mysteries of puberty). There is also a fair bit about art and artists, with a dash of early feminism. Plot structureElaine is an artist in her late fifties/early sixties revisiting Toronto for the opening of a retrospective of her work. This brings back vivid memories of her childhood, teens and twenties. The sections set in the past are told chronologically, and interspersed by the contemporary story of a few days in Toronto. Gradually all the threads tie up, particularly near the end when contrasting a curator’s descriptions of Elaine’s works with her own explanations, many of which arise from incidents described earlier in the book. However, “I can no longer control these paintings, or tell them what to mean. Whatever energy they have came out of me. I’m what’s left over.”Her early years were peripatetic but not unhappy: the family travel with her entomologist father. When she is seven, he takes a university post and they settle in the Toronto suburbs, but her family is rather eccentric, and she doesn't quite fit in, exacerbated by her being a tomboy and the fact she’s never really had the opportunity to make friends before, so doesn’t know the unspoken rules. Perhaps inevitably, Elaine becomes the victim of bullying, and the first overt instance is very cruel, although it involves no physical pain or nasty words. There is nothing to tell. “I have no black eyes, no bloody noses to report: C does nothing physical.”The pull of bulliesI’ve never really been bullied, but the thoughts and self-analysis sound plausible. Like so many victims, Elaine feels drawn to the bully: she “is my friend. She likes me. She wants to help me, they all do. They are my friends… I have never had any before and I’m terrified of losing them. I want to please. Hatred would have been easier… I would have known what to do. Hatred is clear, metallic, one-handed, unwavering; unlike love.” She reasons, “I will have to do better. But better at what?... I think they [bully’s older sisters] would be my allies if only they knew. Knew what? Even to myself I am mute.” She even gives things to her tormentors because “in the moment just before giving, I am loved” even though she has no doubt about the love of her own family.Coping strategiesElaine develops various coping strategies. She self-harms in a minor way (“the pain gave me something definite to think about”), adopts a talisman (the eponymous cat’s eye marble and the luck of a royal visit to the city) and in some ways, victimhood builds strength and also empathy. “I can sniff out hidden misery in others now.” She also escapes through art, especially of foreign places and discovers that “Fainting is like stepping sideways, out of your own body, out of your own time or into another time. When you wake up it’s later. Time has gone on without you.”The most important question is only occasionally made explicit: how should parents handle things? When Elaine’s mother realises something of what’s going on, she tells her daughter to toughen up, in part because she doesn’t know what else to suggest. The church-going mother of the main bully has a far more alarming attitude, based on the fact that Elaine is a heathen.Eventually Elaine finds the inner strength to walk away, “I can hear the hatred but also the need. They need me for this and I no longer need them.” Nevertheless, although they sometimes go for years without contact, the connection continues, though balance of their relationship alters at different times. Adult consequencesI don’t know if all victims have the potential to become bullies, but Elaine occasionally has flashes of it in adulthood, “It disturbs me to learn I have hurt someone unintentionally. I want all my hurts to be intentional.” She is always more relaxed around boys (she has an older brother), “boys are my secret allies”. Conversely, “I enjoy pestering the girls in this minor, trivial way: it shows I am not like them” and in a bar with boys from the university art class, “I expect nothing from them. In truth I expect a lot. I expect to be accepted.”As an adult, Elaine is moderately happy and successful, yet her past taints all her relationships to some extent. She also fears passing on her anxieties to her own daughters, “I felt I had to protect them from certain things about myself… But they didn’t seem to need that protection.” As a teenager, she didn’t want to know too much family history, even about apparently trivial things, “All this is known, but unimaginable. I also wish I did not know it. I want my father to be just my father, the way he has always been, not a separate person with an earlier, mythological life of his own. Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.”Lines I liked* ”Clothes lines are strung with… a display of soiled intimacy, which they [mothers] have washed and rinsed, plunging their hands into the grey curdled water."* About knowing about her brother’s secret girlfriend, “Knowing this secret… makes me feel important in a way. But it’s a negative importance. I can know because I don’t count.”* “What they call a shopping complex, as if shopping were a psychic disease.”* In a department store, “the air is saturated with the stink of perfumes at war”.* “All fathers except mine are invisible in day time; day time is ruled by mothers. But fathers come out at night. Darkness brings home the fathers, with their real, unspeakable power. There is more to them than meets the eye.”* On the difference between faith and knowledge: Elaine thought she had a vision, but next morning was less certain, “I’m not sure now, that it really was the Virgin Mary. I believe it but I no longer know it.”* “Art is what you can get away with said somebody or other, which makes it sound like shop-lifting… A hijacking of the visual.”* “My name has solidified around me, with time. I think of it as tough but pliable now, like a well-worn glove.”* “Somehow the war never ended after all, it just broke up into pieces and got scattered, it gets in everywhere, you can’t shut it out.”* On giving money to a beggar, “It’s obscene to have such power; also to feel so powerless.”* “Craziness was considered funny, like all other things that were in reality frightening and profoundly shameful.”* An antique shop has “one-time throwouts, recycled as money”.* The angry sex of a disintegrating relationship: “We make love, if that is any longer the term for it. It’s not shaped like love, not coloured like it, but harsh, war-coloured, metallic. Things are being proved. Or repudiated.”
What do You think about Cat's Eye (1998)?
The writing in this book reminds me quite a lot of Atwood's writing style in The Handmaid's Tale: it feels contemplative, half-dreamy, slower than life. It also reminds me a bit of The Bell Jar, somehow.The way this book was structured was the most interesting thing for me: the past blending with the present, the present fading back into the past. Another interesting thing was the handle Atwood has on people -- specifically, little girls. I knew a Cordelia, a Grace, a Carol. An Elaine.It's not a novel in which things happen, really. It's thoughtful, quiet, realistic. Some people would find it boring, others would find it deep and transforming. I have no particularly strong feelings about it, myself.
—Nikki
“There are things I need to ask her. Not what happened, back then in the time I lost, because now I know that. I need to ask her why.If she remembers. Perhaps she’s forgotten the bad things, what she said to me, what she did. Or she does remember them, but in a minor way, as if remembering a game, or a single prank, a single trivial secret, of the kind girls tell and then forget.She will have her own version. I am not the centre of her story, because she herself is that. But I could give her something you can never have, except from another person: what you look like from outside. A reflection. This is part of herself I could give back to her. We are like the twins in old fables, each of whom has been given half a key.”‘Cat’s Eye’ is a deeply visceral and disturbingly dissociative tale of longing, loathing and loss.The spectre of childhood trauma and treachery, the disorientation of fragmented memories and the bewilderment associated with the restoration of the Self…the eloquence of this novel is humbling.
—Fiona
SpoilersTook a while to get into this. I didn't really like the back and forth narration between the past and present (it didn't flow very well), also the main character (Elaine) irked me quite a lot. I hated the 'present-day' Elaine, I was only really invested in Elaine's character when she was a child/teen, those chapters were great. Young Elaine's personality, surroundings and relationships were fascinating to read about, especially the parts which focused on her complicated friendships with Cordelia, Grace and Carol. Older Elaine was just boring, I didn't care about her art show or her ex husband or her navel gazing about her hometown and how she was growing older. Old Elaine was unlikable, dull, pretentious, and up herself (and not in an interesting way). I hated how she seemed to always idolise men (no matter how douchey they were) and demonise women (even if they were doing nothing wrong). After everything Elaine had been through she still hadn't learnt anything, she had the same old I-love-boys-because-they-have-no-drama-and-play-no-games-unlike-women-who-are-all-crazy-evil-bitches attitude. To her men had no agendas and were lovable buffoons or lost little puppies that needed protecting whereas women were either manipulative and bitchy or shallow and insipid. Elaine's misogynistic thoughts and attitude were just tiresome and not at all interesting to read.The most engrossing element of Cat's Eye was the bullying young Elaine suffered at the hands of Cordelia and co, it was written very well. I also loved Elaine's family/home life, especially her relationship with her brother and how they lived with the war going on and had to constantly move around because of their dad's work. It all read as quite nostalgic and familiar.One thing that really bugged me was Elaine seeming to forget everything Cordelia and her friends did to her. Even though she was young I would have expected her to remember at least some of the bullying she'd suffered through, especially when she started to hang around with Cordelia again. It was like Elaine refused to even think about it, but how could she not think about it when Cordelia was constantly in her face in high school? The selective amnesia was a bit too far fetched.I would have much rather preferred Elaine's story to be linear and consist of just her childhood/teen and university days. It would have been more like a coming-of-age sort of story, and I wouldn't have had to put up with the dull, older Elaine and the irritating switches from past to present. In all, not my favourite Atwood story, but still enjoyable enough despite the issues I had with the main character.
—Ferdy
