Surfacing

Margaret Atwood’s “Surfacing” is a bit of a creepy little novel about a woman who returns to her hometown in Quebec to look for her missing father. She brings her boyfriend along and a married couple who accompany her to her family’s old cabin on a remote, woodsy island. But with her father disappeared and her mother deceased, all that’s there are her childhood memories, which seem to overtake her. It’s while she’s staying on the island to look for him that her mind begins to unravel.

Check out the book’s cover; doesn’t it make you feel a bit uneasy? In that respect, it slightly reminded me of Dennis Lehane’s “Shutter Island” from 2003. But “Surfacing” was published 40 years ago in 1972, and has a lot of themes going on in it from that era, particularly Quebec’s separatist movement, Canadian nationalism, feminism, and environmentalism. The main character feels alienated by social pressures that she play a particular role because of her gender – which makes her respond by withdrawing.

“Surfacing” feels like it’s from the late ’60s – the four characters are hippy-ish — but still the novel seems quite potent today. Partly that’s because Margaret Atwood is a master who doesn’t mess around getting her themes across, but also it’s because these themes still linger. I had to grin a bit when the character David wants to drive the “fascist pig Yanks” out of Canada. The American “infiltration” up North is still a real sore point among quite a few.

I liked the novel as I felt as if I were on the island with the four characters – one of which is a chauvinist jerk — and there’s an ominous feeling that something eerie is going to happen. It’s quite tangible but towards the end, I did have to read some passages a few times over to make sense of what is going on. It gets quite loopy and is not totally easy to understand in places. But the writing is quite lyrical and otherworldly.

This is my third novel that I’ve read by Margaret Atwood, who I think is such a unique and powerful writer. “Alias Grace” is perhaps my favorite, but this one isn’t shabby either. I plan to keep reading Atwood and other Canadian authors because I live in Canada now – and want to familiarize myself with the great fiction of this vast and wonderful country.