LIFE BEFORE MAN by Margaret Atwood (First published 1980)
Margaret Atwood is an intelligent enough writer not to depend on contrived drama or sensationalised events, but with this novel she’s almost dispensed with a plot too. This wouldn’t necessarily be a drawback if any of the characters were likeable but I couldn’t warm to, or care about, any of them.
The story, if you could call it that, is told from three perspectives. The dated chapters alternate between the points of view of an unhappily married couple Elizabeth and Nate and his recently acquired lover Lesje (pronounced Lashia).
Both women are paleontologists which, given the title, seems an obvious cue for rating the male of the species on a par with dinosaurs. The nearest we get to this accusation is near the end when, at the end of her tether, we are told of Lesje that “it’s long been her theoretical opinion that Man is a danger to the universe, a mischievous ape, spiteful, destructive, malevolent”.
Actually, truth be told, neither gender is portrayed in any specially positive light. All that essentially happens is that Nate procrastinates over whether to make the final break from his wife, a decision complicated by their having two young kids. Lesje leaves her partner Wlliam to make way for him while Elizabeth sleeps with William more out of malice than desire. They start our discontented and frustrated and are no better off at the end.
It all begins with a mysterious suicide of Elizabeth’s lover, a death that looms large without being properly explained. Actually, although the protagonists go through the motions of being honest and open with each other there’s always a lingering unspoken bitterness just below the surface.
For the most part this is an account of still lives occasionally interspersed with some joyless, sometimes violent, copulation; not exactly an optimistic take on modern relationships. It’s ultimately a story of victims with no victors
By the finish it’s tempting to regard the characters as no better than the museum exhibits – “wired into a grotesque semblance of life”.
