Margaret Atwood was born in 1939, making her half a generation older than me. Her first novel came out in 1969 and this, her fourth, in 1979. So, like, let’s say, Mick Jagger or John Lennon, she is/was both a voice for our generation, the boomers, yet not quite of it. When you think about it, and this applies more to writers than to musicians, the delay in getting published quite often means the writers we think of as our contemporaries, the writers who began being published as we came to adulthood, are quite a bit older than we are.
Atwood makes me think about this because the vibe of her earlier works, which I have been reading over the last few MARMs, are of the 1950s and early 60s when Atwood herself was coming to adulthood. Atwood’s young men wear grey flannel trousers, sloppy jumpers and tweed jackets.
Luckily for Atwood, and for us, her main concerns in these works, relationships, are universal.
Life Before Man is set in 1978. It has three protagonists – Elizabeth, Nate and Lesje – and the story is told with the POV rotating between those three. Elizabeth and Lesje (which is apparently Ukranian for Alice) work in the department of paleontology in Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and Lesje is crazy about dinosaurs, hence the title – I tried to think of another, clever meaning for the title, but without success; Nate, who was for a while a suburban lawyer, now makes wooden toys (and very little money); Elizabeth and Nate are married, with two daughters; Elizabeth’s lover, Chris, has just committed suicide by blowing his head off (and Nate has had to identify him for the police); Nate is getting tired of his lover, Martha, and is planning to move on.
Atwood, as an author, doesn’t have a very good opinion of men; and Nate, frankly, is a sad sack (how he ever got one lover, let alone dumped her and found a replacement, is beyond me)
So for a week now, ever since that night, she’s spent the afternoons in there lying on the bed that used to be his, half his, and he’s been bringing her cups of tea, one each afternoon. She accepts them with that dying swan look of hers, the look he can’t stand and can’t resist. It’s your fault, darling, but you may bring me cups of tea. Scant atonement. And an aspirin out of the bathroom and a glass of water. Thank you. Now go away somewhere and feel guilty. He’s a sucker for it. Like a good boy.
For the rest of the novel, Elizabeth, while in despair at the loss of Chris, attempts to maintain her control over not just Nate but also Martha, and then Lesje, as Nate begins to look towards her.
If Elizabeth and Nate have an ‘open marriage’ it is because Elizabeth became bored with Nate, found someone else, persuaded Nate to find himself a someone else, but needs them to stay together for the children. Later, Lesje contemplates being a single mother in the face of societal disapproval. These are concerns of the mid sixties, not the late seventies. I can’t help comparing Margaret Atwood with our three years younger Helen Garner. Garner describes with unerring accuracy the inner Melbourne of share houses, de facto marriages, and single motherhood that I knew in the 1970s; Atwood describes lives I might imagine for my younger teachers.
I’m sure Atwood is describing people and situations she knew. Marcie says that the Toronto of that time was notably conservative. I guess that’s the explanation.
Life Before Man is more slice of life than story, the three protagonists move on, both in relation to each other, but also in relation to their various childhoods
Elizabeth, he said, had had an unhappy childhood. “Who didn’t?” Lesje said. “Who didn’t have an unhappy childhood? What’s so special?” If he wanted unhappy childhoods, she’d tell him about hers.
I would like to say more about Nate’s shilly-shallying around both Elizabeth and Lesje, but that would take us too far into the plot. So what can I say? The character development is excellent, and despite all I’ve written above, I enjoyed seeing how Atwood worked us through their various relationships.
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Margaret Atwood, Life Before Man, first pub. 1978