While The Hour I First Believed threatened my faith in literature - well, contemporary literature at least - Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood restored it. My first foray into Atwood was the apocalyptic Oryx and Crake, followed by The Blind Assassin and The Handmaid's Tale. None of these really gripped me, yet I was intrigued by the way the author handled her language, a bit like an animal-wrangler might handle her latest pet - adoring but always cautious.
Cat's Eye is about a painter named Elaine Risley preparing for a restrospective of her work in her hometown of Toronto, Canada. Her reflections about the development of her work fuse together with her musings about the ways in which the city has and has not changed, until she is walking the path of her memory to confront old monsters. But there is more, so much more, that Elaine has (wilfully) forgotten and that she refuses to resurrect in her present tense. Something that is made clear and given ringing resonance by the narration of Elaine-as-a-pre-teen, which dominates much of the first two-thirds of the novel.
The plot may sound like that of the latest made-for-TV-in-time-for-Christmas flick, but Atwood's mastery of her craft saves the novel from ever reading like one. Metaphors are draped across the novel, invoked when needed and left to rest when not. No detail is superfluous, but this detail is never overwhelming. It carries you to the conclusions you are meant to reach, while letting you think you walked there yourself.
I finished the novel late last night and woke up this morning chewing on the phrase: "An eye for an eye." While Wally Lamb plays paintball target practice with a similar theme, missing more than he hit, Atwood is like a doctor drawing blood. I will be chewing on this one for a while, I think.
Disclaimer: I can't find an image of the cover of the specific edition that I read, which features the face of a middle-aged woman in shadow, with her chin in one hand. None of the other covers that I can find capture the magic of this novel, so I am choosing not to include a cover image.
