Response # 3 "Bodily Harm"

I have realized a very cool thing about Atwood's style of writing, in this book any way. When Rennie has flash backs of her family, especially her mom and grandmother, they have quirky sayings that make them unique, like, "it drives you bats, and then they put you in the loony bin". As it flashes back to reality, or the currant issue, Rennie uses those sayings more often, and you notice the true underlying relationships between and Rennie and her family.Atwood also balances her writing out very nicely. She will introduce a new, dark plot twist or upsetting historic fact, and then balance it with something about hopefulness.
When Rennie's friend Lora is telling her her life story, or a bit of it, she talks about depressing living conditions and abusive step fathers with disgusting cats, which made me feel uncomfortable. Then she counters it with a sweet quote from some one insightful, or hopeful and wise, in this case it's Lora's mother who says,"where there's life there's hope." Daniel the doctor uses inspiring quotes like these, to help her through her battle with breast cancer, and cope with the stress, and though there often cheesy, like "you have a blank sheet now, your free to write the life you want to live," this is also a bad pun, because she's a journalist. Sometimes its nice to hear cheesy inspirational quotes, they lighten a situation very quickly, and help the reader, myself, not feel to down about the frightening thoughts that Rennie has about dying and becoming too much like her sick dead grandmother... heavy eh? yeah.

Atwood has incorporated many aspects to the story, and the themes range from politics, romance, to suspense, it's very cool. However one might not expect to find politics and romance merged into one successfully, and I can't tell if Atwood is doing it well or not. Well, i suppose she is, because magically she seems to make the politics in St. Agathe affect Rennie's personal love life, all the themes are intricately woven and sometimes it's hard to follow. Maybe I'm not mature enough to read of a political romance, and I'm sure that's the case because I don't understand it, but for an older audience the story may be great. Sometimes she plays heavily on Rennie's love life, incorporating three men into that life; Jake, Paul and Daniel, and each has a very unique background that adds depth to Rennie's circumstances.
Right now i am waiting for something to happen, Rennie, Paul and Lara have been touring the city for pages, and I keep expecting a plot twist or maybe even the man from Rennie's room to come back but nothing happens! She keeps waking up, eating bad food, travelling, wondering about male possibilities, come on already! around 230 pages in, Rennie picks up a package for a lady on the island with heart problems. She brings it home, opens it, and finds the pieces to a machine gun, this could have been a very interesting happenstance, but the incident just disappears. It's like Atwood is the most teasing, cynical person ever! She gives you a juicy incident, then moves on, then gives you a new lead, and gives some history. At some point in this novel, it had better come together, or I will not be impressed. Maybe if I had the patience to read through the miles of description and sub stories, I would be OK, but apparently I don't.
Atwood's description is highly superb though I must say, for the large amount, it is all very good. The way she describes Rennie's hotel food actually makes you nauseated, like her desert that was supposed to be pudding, but looked like "a chalky residue on top, and mold had developed from the inside infecting the food in dangerous ways," yuck. Not only the food, but some of her descriptions can just make you gag, she's very good at that, like this description of a woman's washroom, "there is a strong smell in the woman's washroom, tepid flesh, face powder, and ammonia," you can practically smell the awfulness.
So in total so far, I think the story has gone far enough without something making perfect sense, or something radical happening, or maybe I'm missing the bigger picture... I'm going to go with missing the bigger picture, and hope that the last hundred pages pull together the last threads of plot for me.