. . . To date, I have written three full-length fictions that nobody would ever class as sociological realism: The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood. Are these books “science fiction,” I am often asked? Though sometimes I am not asked, but told: I am a silly nit or a genre traitor for dodging the term, because these books are as much “science fiction” as 1984 is, whatever I might say. But is 1984 as much “science fiction” as The Martian Chronicles, I might reply? I would answer not, and therein lies the distinction.

Much depends on your nomenclatural allegiances, or else on your system of literary taxonomy. Back in 2008 I was talking to a much younger person about “science fiction.” I’d been asked by the magazine New Scientist to answer the question, “Is science fiction going out of date?” But then I realized that I didn’t know the answer, and one of the reasons for this was that I didn’t really grasp what the term “science fiction” meant any more. Is this term a corral with real borders that separate what is clearly “science fiction” from what is not, or is it merely a shelving aid, there to help workers in bookstores place the book in a semi-accurate or at least lucrative way? If you put skin-tight black or silver clothing on a book cover along with some jet-like flames and/or colourful planets, does that make the work “science fiction”? What about dragons and manticores, or backgrounds that contain volcanoes or atomic clouds, or plants with tentacles, or landscapes reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch? Does there have to be any actual science in such a book, or is the skin-tight clothing enough? These seemed to me to be open questions.

This much younger person – let’s call him Randy, which was in fact his name – did not have a hard and fast definition of “science fiction,” but he knew it when he saw it, kind of. As I told New Scientist, “For Randy – and I think he’s representative – Sci-fi does include other planets, which may or may not have dragons on them. It includes the wildly paranormal – not your aunt table-tilting or things going creak, but shape-shifters and people with red eyeballs and no pupils, and Things taking over your body.” Here I would include such items as Body Snatchers – if of extra-terrestrial rather than folkloric provenance – and Pod People, and heads growing out of your armpits, though, as I’ve said, I’d exclude common and garden variety devils, and demonic possession, and also vampires and werewolves, which have literary ancestries and categories all their own.

To continue with the results of my informal interview with Randy: Sci-fi “includes, as a matter of course, space ships, and Mad Scientists, and Experiments Gone Awfully Wrong. Plain ordinary horror doesn’t count –- chain-saw murderers and such. Randy and I agreed that you might meet one of those walking along the street. It’s what you definitely would not meet walking along the street that counts, for Randy.” Randy judged such books in part by their covers, which means that my speculations about jacket images are not entirely irrelevant. As one friend’s child put it, “Looks like milk, tastes like milk – it IS milk!” Thus: looks like science fiction, has the tastes of science fiction – it IS science fiction!

Or more or less. Or kind of. For covers can be misleading. The earliest mass-market paperbacks of my novels, The Edible Woman and Surfacing, had pinkish covers with gold scrollwork designs on them and oval frames with a man’s head and a woman’s head silhouetted inside them, just like valentines. How many readers picked these books up, hoping to find a Harlequin Romance or reasonable facsimile, only to throw them down in tears because there are no weddings at the ends?

Then there was the case of the former Soviet Union. No sooner did the Wall come down in 1989 than pornography flooded across the one-time divide. Porn had hitherto been excluded in favour of endless editions of the classics and other supposed-to-be-good-for-you works, but forbidden fruit excites desire, and everyone had already read Tolstoy, a lot. Suddenly the publishers of serious literature were hard pressed. Thus it was that The Robber Bride appeared in a number of Soviet-bloc countries with covers that might be described as – at best – deceptive, and – at worst – as a Eurotrash slutfest in flagranto. How many men in raincoats purchased the Robber Bride edition sporting a black-satin-sheathed Zenia with colossal rocket-shaped tits, hoping for a warm one-handed time in a back corner, only to heave it into the trash with a strangled Foiled Again! curse? For the Zenia in my book performs what we can only assume is her sexual wizardry offstage.

Having thus misled readers twice – inadvertently – by dint of book covers and the genre categories implied by them, I would rather not do it again. I would like to have space creatures on offer at my word-wares booth, and I would if I could: they were, after all, my first childhood love. But, being unable to produce them, I don’t want to lead the reader on, thus generating a frantic search within the pages – Where are the Lizard Men of Xenor? – that can only end in disappointment.

My desire to explore my relationship with the SF world, or worlds, has a proximate cause. In 2009, I published The Year of the Flood, the second work of fiction in a series exploring another kind of “other world” – our own planet in a future. (I carefully say a future rather than the future, because the future is an unknown: from the moment now, an infinite number of roads lead away to “the future,” each heading in a different direction.)

The Year of the Flood was reviewed, along with its sibling, Oryx and Crake, by one of the reigning monarchs of the SF and Fantasy forms: Ursula K. LeGuin. Her 2009 Guardian article began with a paragraph that has caused a certain amount of uproar in the skin-tight clothing and other-planetary communities – so much so that scarcely a question period goes by at my public readings without someone asking – usually in injured tones – why I have forsworn the term “science fiction,” as if I’ve sold my children to the salt mines.

Here are LeGuin’s uproar-causing sentences:

To my mind, The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake and now The Year of the Flood all exemplify one of the things science does, which is to extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near-future that’s half prediction, half satire. But Margaret Atwood doesn’t want any of her books to be called science fiction. In her recent, brilliant essay collection, Moving Targets, she says that everything that happens in her novels is possible and may even have already happened, so they can’t be science fiction, which is ‘fiction in which things happen that are not possible today’. This arbitrarily restrictive definition seems designed to protect her novels from being relegated to a genre still shunned by hidebound readers, reviewers and prize-awarders. She doesn’t want the literary bigots to shove her into the literary ghetto.

The motive imputed to me is not in fact my actual motive for requesting separate names. (If winning prizes were topmost on my list, and if writing such books would guarantee non-wins, my obvious move would be to just avoid writing them.) What I mean by “science fiction” is those books that descend from H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, which treats of an invasion by tentacled, blood-sucking Martians shot to earth in metal canisters – things that could not possibly happen – whereas, for me, “speculative fiction” means plots that descend from Jules Verne’s books about submarines and balloon travel and such – things that really could happen, but just haven’t completely happened yet. I would place my own books in this second category: no Martians. Not because I don’t like Martians, I hasten to add: they just don’t fall within my skill set. Any seriously-intended Martian by me would be a very clumsy Martian indeed.

In a public discussion with Ursua LeGuin in the fall of 2010, however, I found that what she means by “science fiction” is speculative fiction about things that really could happen, whereas things that really could not happen she classifies under “fantasy.” Thus, for her – as for me – dragons would belong in fantasy, as would, I suppose, the film Star Wars and most of the TV series Star Trek. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein might squeeze into LeGuin’s “science fiction,” because its author had grounds for believing that electricity actually might be able to reanimate dead flesh. And War of the Worlds? Since people thought at the time that intelligent beings might live on Mars, and since space travel was believed to be possible in the imaginable future, this book might have to be filed under LeGuin’s “science fiction.” Or parts of it might. In short, what LeGuin means by “science fiction” is what I mean by “speculative fiction,” and what she means by “fantasy” would include what I mean by “science fiction.” So that clears it all up, more or less. When it comes to genres, the borders are increasingly undefended, and things slip back and forth across them with insouciance.

Bendiness of terminology, literary gene-swapping, and inter-genre visiting has been going on in the SF world – loosely defined – for some time, if not forever. For instance, in a 1989 essay called “Slipstream,” veteran SF author Bruce Sterling deplored the then-current state of Science Fiction and ticks off its writers and publishers for having turned it into a mere “category” – a “self-perpetuating commercial power-structure, which happens to be in possession of a traditional national territory: a portion of bookstore rack space.” A “category,” says Sterling, is distinct from a “genre,” which is “a spectrum of work united by an inner identity, a coherent aesthetic, a set of conceptual guidelines, an ideology if you will.”

Sterling defines his term “Slipstream” – so named, I suppose, because it is seen as making use of the air currents created by Science Fiction proper – in this way:

. . . I want to describe what seems to me to be a new, emergent ‘genre,’ which has not yet become a ‘category.’ This genre is not ‘category’ SF; it is not even ‘genre’ SF. Instead, it is a contemporary kind of writing which has set its face against consensus reality. It is fantastic, surreal sometimes, speculative on occasion, but not rigorously so. It does not aim to provoke a ‘sense of wonder’ or to systematically extrapolate in the manner of classic science fiction. Instead, this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the late twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility.

His proposed list of slipstream fictions then goes on to cover an astonishing amount of ground, with works by a wide assortment of people, many of them considered to be “serious” authors – from Kathy Acker and Martin Amis to Salman Rushdie to José Saramago to Kurt Vonnegut. What they have in common is that the kinds of events they recount are unlikely to have happened to anyone in a piece of naturalistic fiction such as Mr. Bailey, Grocer – itself an invention of George Gissing’s, who was also a naturalistic novelist. In an earlier era, they all might have been filed under the heading of ‘traveller’s yarn’ – for example, Herodotus’s accounts of monopods and giant ants, or mediaeval legends about unicorns, dragons, and mermaids. Later they might have turned up in other collections of the marvelous and uncanny, such as Des Knaben Wunderhorn, or – even later – the kind of You-won’t-believe-this hair-raiser to be found in assortments by M.R. James or H.P. Lovecraft or – occasionally – R.L. Stevenson. But surely all draw from the same deep well – those imagined other worlds located somewhere near our everyday one. Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Sword and Sorcery Fantasy, and Slipstream Fiction: all of them might be placed under the same large “wonder tale” umbrella.

The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood, McLelland & Stewart 2009

Margaret Atwood doesn’t like hearing her novels called science fiction. In an article originally written for Book-of-the-Month Club/Bookspan and reprinted in her 2004 collection Moving Targets, Atwood explicitly disavows the term, which in her mind involves intergalactic space travel, teleportation, and Martians. Referring specifically to her 2003 dystopian epic Oryx and Crake, Atwood avers that “it invents nothing we haven’t already invented or started to invent. Every novel begins with a what if, and then sets forth its axioms. The what if of Oryx and Crake is simply, What if we continue down the road we’re already on? How slippery is the slope? What are our saving graces? Who’s got the will to stop us?”

The answers that Atwood comes up with are not likely to soothe hearts made anxious by early 21st-century existential malaise. Set in a post-Apocalyptic wasteland, Oryx and Crake posits a world that has been vanquished by human meddling. Before the plague that wiped out most of humankind, society has devolved into a sort of social Darwinian nightmare: wealthy corporations such as HealthWyzer set up compounds to seal off their denizens from the “pleeblands” where “the addicts, the muggers, the paupers, the crazies” hold sway. Security has been outsourced to a group of corporate commandos – the CorpSeCorps – and genetic engineering projects have been allowed to proliferate beyond all reason. AnooYoo is in the business of developing and selling products to alter a person’s physique in any way imaginable: “Cosmetic creams, workout equipment, Joltbars to build your muscle-scape into a breathtaking marvel of sculpted granite. Pills to make you fatter, thinner, hairier, balder, whiter, browner, blacker, yellower, sexier, and happier.” For amusement, the Web offers an interactive game called Extinctathon, which measures a user’s knowledge of extinct animals and plants, and there is a practically unlimited traffic in child pornography.

How slippery is the slope on which we currently find ourselves? If the Atwood of Oryx and Crake is to be believed, very slippery indeed. It should go without saying that our devotion to a kind of cutthroat consumerism is increasing the gap between rich and poor in Western societies; the Boomer generation’s defiant refusal to age gracefully has resulted in a vibrant market for plastic surgery, cosmetics, and other palliatives to disguise the body’s inevitable decay; genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have given rise to modifications in food products as varied as rapeseed, soy, and tomatoes; and the Internet is a locus of virtual reality and pornography of all stripes (legal and otherwise). All of these things are extant in our world; Atwood merely ratchets up the volume and pushes them to their logical extreme.

Still, her brusque dismissal of the term science fiction to describe the results seems odd, especially when seen in light of her remarks about another, earlier book, one which was hugely influential on both Oryx and Crake and its follow-up, 2009’s The Year of the Flood. In her introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of H.G. Wells’s 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, Atwood asserts that Wells referred to his tales as “scientific romances,” but only because the specific generic classification science fiction had yet to be coined. About Doctor Moreau, Atwood writes:

photo by George Whiteside, courtesy of Giller website

There are several interpretations of the term “science.” If it implies the known and the possible, then Wells’s scientific romances are by no means scientific: he paid little attention to such boundaries. As Jules Verne remarked with displeasure, “Il invente!” (“He makes it up!”). The “science” part of these tales is embedded instead in a world-view that derived from Wells’s study of Darwinian principles under Huxley, and has to do with the grand concern that engrossed him throughout his career: the nature of man. This too may account for his veering between extreme Utopianism (if man is the result of evolution, not of Divine creation, surely he can evolve yet further?) and the deepest pessimism (if man derived from the animals and is akin to them, rather than to the angels, surely he might slide back the way he came?). The Island of Doctor Moreau belongs to the debit side of the Wellsian account book.

Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood also belong to the debit side of the account book, in that they chronicle the latter days of a species – homo sapiens – that seems hell-bent on returning to a pre-evolutionary state along a road that is ironically paved by our own ingenuity: we are involved in the wholesale pursuit of the very technologies that will serve as the instruments of our destruction. Although The Year of the Flood is ultimately a more hopeful book than its predecessor, there is nevertheless a strain of “the deepest pessimism” running through it.

Like Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood “invents nothing we haven’t already invented or started to invent.” Therefore, by Atwood’s own admission, it is “scientific” in the sense that “it implies the known and the possible.” Why, then, the almost preternatural aversion to the classification science fiction? Likely, Atwood’s hesitancy arises out of the suspicion (at best) and outright marginalization (at worst) that novels designated as such have experienced in this country. As a literary genre, science fiction is ranked somewhere just above chick-lit romances and Westerns in the pantheon of legitimacy. William Gibson and Robert J. Sawyer may be among the bestselling authors in the land, but it’s unlikely they will ever find their way into the kinds of discussions about great Canadian literature that are carried out by our self-appointed cultural gatekeepers, who generally react to sci-fi the way they might be expected to react if they caught someone defecating on their front lawn.

Then again, Atwood is equally cagey when it comes to the matter of The Year of the Flood’s precise relationship to Oryx and Crake. Although her Canadian paperback publisher, Vintage Canada, reissued the earlier book in 2009 as “The First Book of the MaddAddam Trilogy,” Atwood bristles when it is suggested that The Year of the Flood constitutes a sequel. The author told the U.K. magazine The Bookseller, “It’s not a sequel and it’s not a prequel. It’s a ‘simultaneouel’ in that it takes place during the same time span and with a number of people in it who are peripheral in Oryx and Crake but are central in The Year of the Flood.” Ah, yes: a simultaneouel. Right-o, then.

All of these semantic distinctions – science fiction vs. speculative fiction, prequel vs. sequel vs. “simultaneouel” – are little more than window dressing, a lexicographical parlour game that only serves to obscure the matter at hand: does The Year of the Flood work as fiction, on its own terms and with its own internal logic and integrity? It does, but at more than 400 pages, the book is also slower and more diffuse than its predecessor. It’s a bleak work that nevertheless ends on a note of marginal uplift, but the relentless satire that drove Oryx and Crake is diluted, replaced by something that closely resembles melancholy.

The story begins in the same situation as the earlier novel: a pandemic, which Crake developed while working in a biotech lab, has been set loose and created a wasteland where genetically altered animals – pigoons and wolvogs and rakunks – run rampant and the CorpSeCorps security contingent has clamped down. The two survivors we meet at the book’s outset are Toby, who has taken refuge in the AnooYou spa where she was working when the plague broke out, and Ren, a trapeze dancer at the Scales and Tails strip club, who was quarantined just prior to the outbreak because she was bitten by a client who might have been carrying a sexually transmitted disease.

Toby and Ren are erstwhile members of a strange eco-cult known as God’s Gardeners, a back-to-the-earth group of vegetarians with bad fashion sense led by a scientist-turned-prophet called Adam One. In stark contrast to the brutal and misogynistic theocracy that dominated Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, the religious faction depicted in The Year of the Flood is largely benign: they grow their own food on rooftop gardens and sing atrocious hymns and prepare for the coming of the Waterless Flood:

A massive die-off of the human race was impending, due to over-population and wickedness, but the Gardeners exempted themselves: they intended to float above the Waterless Flood, with the aid of the food they were stashing away in the hidden storeplaces they called Ararats. As for the flotation devices in which they would ride out this flood, they themselves would be their own Arks, stored with their own collections of inner animals, or at least the names of those animals. Thus they would survive to replenish the Earth. Or something like that.

Readers will forgive the Gardeners a certain theological fuzziness because they are for the most part benevolent, especially when compared to the rapacious CorpSeCorps guards who protect the wealthy corporation workers and ruthlessly put down insurrections from the impoverished pleebmobs. When Adam One discovers Toby, she is working at SecretBurgers (the secret involves the burgers’ key ingredients: suffice it to say that stray corpses don’t last long in the pleeblands), where she is repeatedly raped by her boss, Blanco.

Atwood has often had difficulty with her male characters and Blanco is no exception; a broad caricature of a sexual sadist, his function in the novel is purely to antagonize Toby to such an extent that she is willing to flee with Adam One, and then to hide out at AnooYou once her whereabouts is discovered.

But, strangely, in this novel the women also seem like ciphers, or at the very least somewhat underdeveloped, each one evincing a dominant trait or characteristic that is sounded again and again through the novel like a chorus. Toby is the tough one. Ren is the naive one. Amanda is the artist who creates living eco-art. There are a host of other characters, including Jimmy (Snowman) and Glenn (Crake), who reappear from the earlier novel; Zeb, one of the Gardeners who goes on to create MaddAddam, the online entity that runs Extinctathon and becomes a nexus point for the survivors of the Waterless Flood; and Rebecca Eckler a solidly built black woman who unfortunately shares a name with a skinny white journalist (who won the opportunity to have a character in the book named after her in a charity auction). None of these characters makes a huge impression on the reader during the course of the novel, and none remains in the reader’s memory for very long afterward.

This is because The Year of the Flood is more a novel of ideas than a novel of character. Atwood is more focused on the details of her plague-ridden, Apocalyptic wasteland than she is on the nuances of the people who move across it. This is evident from the opening page:

As the first heat hits, mist rises from among the swath of trees between her and the derelict city. The air smells faintly of burning, a smell of caramel and tar and rancid barbecues, and the ashy but greasy smell of a garbage-dump fire after it’s been raining. The abandoned towers in the distance are like the coral of an ancient reef – bleached and colourless, devoid of life.
There still is life, however. Birds chirp; sparrows, they must be. Their small voices are clear and sharp, nails on glass: there’s no longer any sound of traffic to drown them out. Do they notice that quietness, the absence of motors? If so, are they happier?

This is what sticks with a reader long after the final page has been turned. The persistent feel of rot and decay, of stink and ash, but at the same time, the determination of life to find its way through the wreckage. The finale of the book brings us full circle to the final scene in Oryx and Crake, and while we discover the identity of the three mysterious figures at the end of the previous book, there is still ambiguity: What do the figures carrying torches off in the distance portend? Is it redemption that approaches, or final annihilation? (After all, Crake has been compared to Dr. Frankenstein, and we all know what the figures with torches portended in that story.)

Critics have suggested that in her speculative mode (to use Atwood’s preferred term), she is acting as the figure of Pandora from Greek mythology, opening up her fictional box and allowing the chaos to swirl out around her and her readers. I prefer to think of her as a different mythological figure: Cassandra, who warned of impending doom, but in vain, for the gods saw to it that there was no one who would believe her. Atwood has been eerily prescient in the past (her 2008 Massey Lectures, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth predicted the global economic downturn in scarily precise terms); if it is true that The Year of the Flood “invents nothing we haven’t already invented or started to invent,” then the novel should stand as a cautionary tale about the slippery slope that we are all on, and what we can do to reverse our course before it’s too late. As prophecy, The Year of the Flood is not so much a dystopian thought experiment as it is a horror story. Just don’t call it science fiction.

The Door
Margaret Atwood
McClelland & Stewart, 2007
120 pages, $18.00

The usual modus operandi, one she herself has gone to great lengths to encourage, for exploring Margaret Atwood’s poetry is thematic. Rather than follow in the murky prints of the clan and add footnotes on the individual as victim in an indifferent, even hostile, natural and political macrocosm, on familial disaffection, on the past as sepulchral and inviolable law, on creation as futile reactivity, I’ll instead fondle the poems in The Door from an aesthetic perspective.

The Door is divided into five parts: poems on the personal; on writing; on war and politics; on prophecy; on old age. I like the ordering here. It mirrors the progression of a life through identity, creation, worldly concerns, wisdom (real or imagined), and the long goodbye.

The book’s opener, “Gasoline,” uses the spilled substance as a metaphor for attractive danger. “Was this my best toy, then?” And later: “I knew that it was poison, / its beauty an illusion.” Atwood is at her best with extended metaphors and witty dramatic turns, and “Gasoline” incorporates its effects organically, with resonance. “As if I could. / That’s how gods lived: as if.” The first line expresses the narrator’s limitations; the next one posits a fictional alternative. But even here, “lived” is in the past tense, though the last “as if” refers to “as if anything was possible,” not the narrator’s resigned “as if I could transcend hardship.” This is a curious passage, an important one in Atwood’s unfolding canon. It amplifies the ambiguity the narrator expresses in many of her earlier poems, going as far back as 1971’s “They Are Hostile Nations” from Power Politics, in which the ambiguities jostling between hope and resignation are unresolved.

“Europe On $5 A Day” is a mess. Terse banalities reign: “I can feel this place”; “The city’s old / but new to me”; “I walk along, / looking at everything equally.” It cocoons into the straitjacket of its subject matter. Here it may be appropriate to anticipate a response to this last charge of flatness and torpidity, the response being that dullness in this case is a strategy used to link form and content, thereby giving greater force and authenticity to both. I don’t buy it. Disinterested linguistic structuring puts readers to sleep. One can hardly be stimulated enough to explore, in depth, nuances and layers of meaning when there is little or no nuance and layering of sound, syntax, and feeling. To be quicker: music is necessary to evoke depth, and in an effective poem the two are fused and their conditional apogees disappear.

With the next poem, “Year of the Hen,” the heart sinks. It’s the “uh oh” moment, the first indication that the rest of The Door may resemble “Europe On $5 A Day” rather than “Gasoline.” “Year of the Hen” takes the list poem to new lows. A catalogue should at least be entertaining, various, sonically stimulating. The language in “Hen” is relentlessly depressing:

This is the year of sorting,
of throwing out, of giving back,
of sifting through the heaps, the piles,
the drifts, the dunes, the sediments,

or less poetically, the shelves, the trunks,
the closets, boxes, corners . . . .

Less poetically? What’s the difference between a “heap” and a “pile”? It’s lazy writing. And the inevitable happens. When a writer paints herself into a corner with an accumulation of undifferentiated grey, there’s a mild physiological panic to make room for oneself by an unconvincing leap of emotion, ending (as here) in bathos: “and fingered for their beauty, / and pocketed, space-time crystals / lifted from once indelible days.”

Elegies dominate the rest of the first section, one for the narrator’s father, one for her mother, three for the cat. And it’s the cat that receives the most connective grief, though, with the exception of some fine appellative fondness (“sly fur-faced idol” in “Blackie In Antarctica”), any sentiment in “Mourning For Cats” collapses into inane rhetorical questioning, no fewer than eight consecutive head-spinners (“Why such deep mourning?”) in the closing twenty-three lines.

“Heart” is a preemptive defense of the writer from his or her critics: sensitive heart-spilling artist being silenced by “instant gourmet[s].” The opposite is the reality, of course. There is a paucity of responsible criticism of contemporary Canadian poets and poetry. Many of those poets take this as implied, if not overt, consent for their efforts. The further irony to “Heart” is that its narrator’s commiseration with mawkish revelation is surprising in a poet who registers continuous flatlines on the electrocardiogram index. And there is a third irony: a conspicuous disparity between the harsh diction (twisting, shucking, coughing, broken, racket, guts, deep-red clot, coarse, wound) and the emotional tenor of the poem. It’s analogous to a vivisectionist decrying destruction. Organs from virile bodies must be excised to feed the possibility of life in “victims,” a reverse of the poems’s last-word claim of “heartless,” with its predatory accusation. (Contrast this poem with Atwood’s remarkable “The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart” from 1978’s Two-Headed Poems, where the images are crisp, the assonance apt and purposeful, and the narrator’s ambivalence affecting.)

Ironies proliferate. There is something disagreeable about draping clichés like dull tinsel on a Boxing Day tree when defending the dedication of poets. “She never thought she could do this. / Not her.” . . . “Like the sun through mist.” . . . “Are they dead, or what?” . . . “surely there is still / a job to be done by us, at least.” These latter bon mots are taken at random from the rest of section II.

The middle, and longest, political section continues with infuriating questions: “Is it our fault?” . . . “Or does it?” “What if it does” . . . “Who let it out?” . . . “Why were we so careless,” all from “The Weather.” Is it a searching, honest open-endedness? Coy maneuvering, as in covering all bases? A posturing sublimity? See how adding a squiggly mark after a sentence can make one think? (As in, “how did this pass the publisher’s first screening?”)

“War Photo” is a lovely possibility for an arresting conceit, but the images are cancelled at the outset by the egregious description “very beautiful” for the dancer / dead woman. Repetition takes over as if to transfer feeling by insistent statement rather than imagistic surprise, phrasal lilt, or sonic suggestiveness: “dancing there on the ground,” “dead beautiful woman,” “it’s this beautiful woman.”

Atwood’s political attitudes are cheap scaffolding where thin, broad brushstrokes bleed off plank-pages with the first scrutinizing rainstorm. Dead language abounds. “Nobody cares who wins wars.” “Of course it’s better to win/than not. Who wouldn’t prefer it?” from “Nobody Cares Who Wins”; “They speak words, I think / They testify. / They name names” from “They Give Evidence”; “Even if you had remained alive, / we would never have spoken”; “Now though it seems I am asking / and you are answering” from “War Photo 2.” Political poems, especially, need attention to lyric sinuousness and organic shaping, lest they slide into propagandistic prose and ideological proselytizing. Bald messages belong in an op-ed daily, not in a poem.

“Another Visit to the Oracle” from Section IV is simply embarrassing in its mishmash of cryptic circularity, hermetic inconsequence, colloquial asides, and stray soliloquizing. The addressee is unknown though not important anyway since the “prophetess” narrator is a transparent excuse for one more installment in unengaged Survivalist declaration. Quoting is superfluous, but the final two lines are worth pondering for their terse philosophical applicability: “I tell dark stories / before and after they come true.”

On that fatalistic note, let’s knock on the volume’s closer. I detailed a bit the book’s first effort, “Gasoline,” as opening the door to the possibility of renewal or spiritual transformation. The same struggle, albeit with more energy and conviction, is available in Atwood’s 1971 “Hesitations Outside The Door” in which “The right lies would at least/be keys, they would open the door. // The door is closed.” And several sections later: “. . . there are no doors, / get out while it is / open, while you still can.” The usual artlessness prevails: haphazard line breaks, skinny diction, clumsy images (“shining blood”), numbing abstractions (“the false / bodies, this love / which does not fit you”), narrative separation, relentless repetition of metaphor (I’d love to have a loonie for every “rock/stone/boulder” appearance), and relationship struggles lacking idiosyncrasy – but at least something approximating engagement, if not passion, occurs in “The Door’s” “first draft.” Last year’s effort, despite its unhinged swinging, shuts – no, entombs – the protagonist in a kind of secular Calvinist futility. What can one say about the offensive reduction of an actual life in which, “you buy a purse, / the dance is nice / . . . you wash the dishes, / you love your children, / you read a book . . . The dog has died. / This has happened before / You got another”? The final, “The door swings closed” is not only anti-climactic but an obvious redundancy, devoid of tension because the lack of juice, the lack of verbal play, in the poem mirrors Atwood’s simplistic idea-phantom of wife and mother. The poem’s ersatz profundity is offensive not only in its reductionism, but because it uses an assumed particularity as a vide supra for universal extrapolation. (One may wish to read John Hersey’s novel The Walnut Door as a lively corrective for what an engaged author can do with this overworked, plain metaphor.)

Margaret Atwood’s poetic world is an uninviting one. I don’t merely mean the fictive psychogeography, but more the silty conduit with the reader. Her writing represents only one of the six primary tastes: astringency. Conspicuous by emotional absence are connections of sweet, bitter, salty, sour, and pungent, and more enjoyably, the resulting delicious intermingling.