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Executive Times |
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2007 Book Reviews |
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Moral
Disorder by Margaret Atwood |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Tangles With her
trademark writing precision and insight into character, Margaret Atwood
presents a new collection of related short stories, tracing one family in
each decade from the 1930s to the present titled, Moral
Disorder. Each story stands on its own, yet when read together,
we become immersed in the many tangles that create families and our
collective memories. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of the story
titled, “The Headless Horseman,” pp. 24-28: For
Halloween that year — the year my sister was two — I
dressed up as the Headless Horseman. Before, I’d only ever been ghosts and
fat ladies, both of which were easy: all you needed was a sheet and a lot of
talcum powder, or a dress and a hat and some padding. But this year would be
the last one I’d ever be able to disguise myself, or so I believed. I was
getting too old for it — I was almost finished with being thirteen — and
so I felt the urge to make a special effort. Halloween
was my best holiday. Why did I like it so much? Perhaps because I could take
time off from being myself, or from the impersonation of myself I was finding
it increasingly expedient, but also increasingly burdensome, to perform in
public. I got the
Headless Horseman idea from a story we’d read in school. In the story, the
Headless Horseman was a grisly legend and also a joke,
and that was the effect I was aiming for. I thought everyone would be
familiar with this figure: if I’d studied a thing in school I assumed it was
general knowledge. I hadn’t yet discovered that I lived in a sort of
transparent balloon, drifting over the world without making much contact with
it, and that the people I knew appeared to me at a different angle from the
one at which they appeared to themselves; and that the reverse was also
true. I was smaller to others, up there in my balloon, than I was to myself.
I was also blurrier. I had an
image of how the Headless Horseman was supposed to look. He was said to ride
around at night with nothing on top of his shoulders but a neck, his head
held in one arm, the eyes fixing the horrified viewer in a ghastly glare. I
made the head out of papier mache,
using strips of newspaper soaked in a flour-and-water paste I cooked myself,
as per the instructions in The Rainy
Day Book of Hobbies. Earlier in my life — long ago, at least two
years ago — I’d had a wistful desire to make all the
things suggested in this book: animals twisted out of pipe cleaners,
balsa-wood boats that would whiz around when you dropped cooking oil into a
hole in the middle, and a tractor thing put together out of an empty thread
spool, two matchsticks, and a rubber band; but somehow I could never find the
right materials in our house. Cooking up paste glue was simple, however: all
you needed was flour and water. Then you simmered and stirred until the paste
was translucent. The lumps didn’t matter, you could
squeeze them out later. The glue got quite hard when it was dry, and I
realized the next morning that I should have filled the pot with water after
using it. My mother always said, “A good cook does her own dishes.” But then,
I reflected, glue was not real cooking. The head
came out too square. I squashed it at the top to make it more like a head, then left it down by the furnace to dry. The drying took
longer than I’d planned, and during the process the nose shrank and the head
began to smell funny. I could see that I should have spent more time on the
chin, but it was too late to add on to it. When the head was dry enough, at
least on the outside, I painted it what I hoped was a flesh colour — a wishy-washy bathrobe
pink — and then I painted two very white eyeballs
with black pupils. The eyes came out a little crossed, but it couldn’t be
helped: I didn’t want to make the eyeballs grey by fooling around with the
black pupils on the damp white paint. I added dark circles under the eyes,
and black eyebrows, and black enamel hair that appeared to have been slicked
down with brilliantine. I painted a red mouth, with a trickle of shiny enamel
blood coming down from one corner. I’d taken care to put a neck stub on the
bottom of the head, and I painted this red — for where the head had
been severed — with a white circle in the middle of the
bottom part, for the neck bone. The body of the Horseman
took some thought. I made a cape out of a piece of black fabric left over
from a now-obsolete puppet stage of mine, gathering it at the neck end — designed to sit on top of my head — and sewing buttons down the front, and
cutting two inconspicuous holes at eye level so I’d be able to see out. I
borrowed my mother’s jodhpurs and riding boots, left over from before she was
married — she hadn’t ridden
a horse since her wedding day, she was in the habit of saying, proudly or
regretfully. Probably it was both. But I didn’t pay much attention to my
mother’s tone of voice, then: I had to tune it out in order to charge full
speed ahead with what I myself was doing. The riding boots were too
big, but I made up for that with hockey socks. I safety-pinned the jodhpurs
around the waist to keep them from falling down. I got hold of some black
winter gloves, and improvised a horse whip out of a stick and a piece of
leather I’d scrounged from the box of archery materials. Archery had once
been popular with my father, and then with my brother; but my father had
given it up, and the box had been abandoned in the trunk room in the cellar,
now that my brother had to study so much. I tried on the entire
outfit in front of my mirror, with the head held in the crook of my arm. I
could scarcely see myself through the eyeholes, but the dark shape looming in
the glass, with two sinister eyeballs staring out balefully from somewhere
near the elbow, looked pretty good to me. On the night itself I
groped my way out the door and joined my best friend of the moment, whose
name was Annie. Annie had done herself up as Raggedy Ann, complete with a wig
of red wool braids. We’d taken flashlights, but Annie had to hold my arm to
guide me through the darker patches of the night, which were numerous in the
badly lit suburb we were traversing. I should have made the eye-holes bigger. We went from door to door,
shouting, “Shell out! Shell out!” and collecting
popcorn balls and candy apples and licorice twists, and the Halloween toffees
wrapped in orange and black waxed paper with designs of pumpkins and bats on
them of which I was especially fond. I loved the sensation of prowling abroad
in the darkness — of being unseen,
unknown, potentially terrifying, though all the time retaining, underneath,
my own harmless, mundane, and dutiful self. There was a full moon, I
think; there ought to have been one. The air was crisp; there were fallen
leaves; jack-o-lanterns burned on the porches, giving off the exciting odour of singed pumpkin. Everything was as I’d imagined
it beforehand, though already I felt it slipping away from me. I was too old,
that was the problem. Halloween was for little children. I’d grown beyond it, I was looking down on it from my balloon. Now that I’d
arrived at the moment I’d planned for, I couldn’t remember why I’d gone to
all that trouble. I was disappointed, too, at
the response of the adults who answered the doors. Everyone knew who my
friend Annie was portraying — “Raggedy
Annie!” they cried with delight, they even got the pun — but to me they said, “And who are you
supposed to be?” My cape had a muffling effect, so I often had to repeat the
answer twice. “The Headless Horseman.” “The headless what?” Then, “What’s
that you’re holding?” they would go on to say. “It’s the head. Of the
Headless Horseman.” “Oh yes, I see.” The head would then be admired, though
in the overdone way adults had of admiring a thing when they secretly
thought it was inept and laughable. It didn’t occur to me that if I’d wanted
my costume to be understood immediately I should have chosen something more
obvious. However, there was one
member of the audience who’d been suitably impressed. It was my little
sister, who hadn’t yet gone to bed when I’d made my way through the living
room en route to the door. She’d taken one look at the shambling black torso
and the big boots and the shiny-haired, frowning, bodiless head, and had
begun to scream. She’d screamed and screamed, and hadn’t been reassured when
I’d lifted up the cape to show that it was really only me underneath. If
anything, that had made it worse. Throughout Moral
Disorder, as in the excerpt, Atwood provides descriptive detail,
character development, and hones in on the core issues in relationships. Memories,
the ideal and the real, are powerful, and thanks to Atwood, lead to
reflection and insight. Steve Hopkins,
December 18, 2006 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the January 2007
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Moral
Disorder.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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