‘All that anxiety and anger, those dubious good intentions, those tangled lives, that blood. I can tell about it or I can bury it. In the end, we’ll all become stories.’ The voice belongs to Nell, the central character of these 11 linked stories, but it could be that of her creator, for these subjects are Margaret Atwood’s speciality. Fortunately for her readers, Atwood chooses to ‘tell’ not to ‘bury’; the result is a deeply interesting book.
The stories are episodes from Canadian 20th-century life, one for each decade. They could stand alone, but put together they make a novel, one that frees itself from the usual constraints. The ‘disorder’ of the title is reflected in the apparent disorder of the narrative. We are required to make jumps forwards and backwards in time, from first-person to third-person narration, from cabin to city to farm, from the conscious to the dreaming or daydreaming mind. In the hands of a lesser writer this would confuse, but Atwood never falters; this is a compelling and lucid composite portrait of a woman, her country and her times.
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