The Robber Bride

Sarah Robertson is associate editor of the Canadian Book Review Annual.

The Robber Bridegroom is a fairy tale about “a handsome stranger who
lures innocent girls to his stronghold in the woods and then chops them
up and eats them.” In Margaret Atwood’s exquisitely crafted,
Toronto-based version, the genders are reversed. The bridegroom becomes
a bride, in the form of Zenia, and the “innocent girls” are the
not-so-innocent male companions of three middle-aged women whose
treacherous history with Zenia dates back to their university days.
Early in the novel, they attend Zenia’s “funeral,” a staged event
that prefaces their nemesis’s chaotic return into their lives.

Atwood delivers a rich study in contrasts in her three heroines: Tony,
a cerebral, logic-driven military historian; Charis, a perennially
bemused New Ager with a talent for reading auras; and Roz, a
razor-witted businesswoman-cum-earth mother. As the novel unfolds, their
dysfunctional childhoods are revealed in harrowing detail. What unites
them is their common victimization at the hands of Zenia—and their
compulsion to make sense of it.

But Zenia resists interpretation, and turns to ash Tony’s “belief
in the salutary power of explanations.” Zenia gives new meaning to the
word “chameleon.” Exotic bird of prey, pathetic cancer victim, drug
dealer, Great Whore (of Revelations fame), government agent, jet-setting
journalist—she is a woman of 1000 faces, all of dubious veracity.
“As with any magician,” Tony concludes, “you saw what she wanted
you to see; or else you saw what you yourself wanted to see. She did it
with mirrors.”

Tony and company are, in fact, active collaborators in their own
victimization. Zenia’s “rapacity and lawlessness” simultaneously
attract and repel, ushering in liberation as well as terror. Of course,
this being Atwood territory, Zenia’s mythic persona is ever being
deflated by those she torments. Contemplating Zenia’s male conquests,
Roz speculates, “She probably has a row of men’s dicks nailed to her
wall, like stuffed animal heads.”

The Robber Bride picks up where Cat’s Eye left off, with its finely
tuned evocation of Toronto and its compassionate (yet never sentimental)
exploration of childhoods gone wrong and adulthoods as rescue missions
of unmistakably Sisyphean dimensions.