Today I spent my breaks outdoors, in the company of Margaret Atwood’s Payback and Dancing Girls: the first lecture in the former, the first story in the latter.

After a very wet and cold September, October was hovering around zero most nights and in the high-single-digit and low-double-digit temperatures most days (Celsius, reluctantly, as my brain persists in Fahrenheit thoughts). The afternoon was warm enough to sit on a step, with a warm cup grasped in one palm, wearing a shawl on top of a sweater.

By the time I post for the fifth time in 2022’s MARM, I’m sure there will be talk of snow.

Payback, subtitled Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, contains five lectures, the first being “Ancient Balances”. This view underscores the intention for these lectures to endure; with the bulk of references to classic literature, along with mythological and religious stories, and most of the pop culture tending towards recognisable Western figures too (Scrooge McDuck, for example, good ol’ Scrooge), Payback’s dating to 2008 seems incidental. It’s simple to rewrite the occasional detail; like, Everquest was a popular video game at the time of publication, but most people who played it are happily engaged in World of Warcraft or the WOW-inspired League of Legends, so the update is second-nature. (How many Atwood readers also play video games? Well, at least one.)

Something else I relate to personally in Atwood’s exploration is her tendency to have mapped what she learned from stories onto her childhood experiences. (This hasn’t always proved useful for me either.) “I knew from fairy tales such as Peter Pan that if you ceased to believe in fairies, they would drop dead; if I stopped believing in banks, would they too expire?” There are many moments in which you can hear her wry intonation as she poses questions like this, which appear simple, then develop into deeper ponderings. There’s talk of epigenetics along with memories of trading marbles and milk-bottle lids: something for everyone.

Throughout, there are indicators of foundational preoccupations which Atwood readers will recognise from her fiction too. After a brief summary and discussion of The Eumenides, for instance, she notes that “although the ancient sense of fairness is a necessary inner foundation stone for any legal system” that doesn’t mean every legal system is fair. “Classical Athens applied fair judgement and allowed full liberties only to Athenian citizens, and only to male ones,” excluding slaves and women. Looks like the next chapter slants more to talk of culture than literature, but that’s for next week’s reading. (You can listen to 2008’s Massey Lectures here.) 

“The War in the Bathroom” from the 1977 collection Dancing Girls is a dozen pages long, divided into third- and first-person observations. At first this is disorienting (though straightforward sentence structure and simple vocabulary balances that experiment with clarity), but as the events unfold, a clearer sense of these voices both inhabiting the same woman settles into place. “Events” is a strong descriptor though: the plot is less important than the voice.

The woman has recently moved into a new room with a shared bath; actually, her room is next to the bathroom. Upon arrival, she was pleased to think of that position as an unexpected convenience; as soon as another of the building’s occupants uses the bathroom, she’s immediately aware of the downside. (Maybe you already reached that conclusion: I did!) With this, I was reminded immediately of the early Alice Munro story, “Royal Beatings”, with its talk of “bathroom noises” and how uncomfortable intimate quarters and breaches can be.

The sense of a dual narrative in “The War in the Bathroom” is echoed in the woman’s concern that one of the building’s residents talks to herself when she’s in there. There are ongoing conversations between two different-sounding voices from the bathroom, and eventually she hears them overlapping: this gives the woman pause. Along with other everyday details of her life (budgeting when she wants ice-cream but must choose frozen peas instead, for instance), this is how the woman moves from Monday through Sunday in her new environment.

When she discovers and exerts a small degree of control over her new environment, a deliberate and possibly inconsequential action, an unexpected (and unresolved) event occurs and the story ends. Abruptly. Readers understand that there is about to be a flurry of first-person accusations or regrets amidst the third-person’s response to the event, but that’s left for readers to imagine. It seems to matter, because there’s some drama, but it’s clear that the undercurrent of the story will persist. There’s still a bad smell in the shared fridge, which hangs over the story, even if one can imagine a for-the-best conclusion just beyond the final page.

What are you reading for MARM this year? Or, are you just about to choose…right now! (This is the fifth iteration of Margaret Atwood Reading Month: here are links to previous participants’ posts, if you’re looking to reminisce or to find some inspiration to join. If you notice that one of your earlier posts is missing, please let me know!)