Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye has won our vote and will be the subject of this month’s reading group.
The 1988 novel was shortlisted for the Booker prize and the Canadian Governor General’s award, and was described in the New York Times as “the finest addition to the Best Girlfriend genre yet.”
The “Best Girlfriend” genre was defined by Atwood herself in 1986. “In the last small while,” she wrote, “there has been a spate of novels by such leading writers as Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Gail Godwin and Alice Walker examining relationships between women – not the sisters, the cousins and the aunts, the grannies and mothers of books like Joan Chase’s During the Reign of The Queen of Persia and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, nor the lovers of the many novels featuring lesbians that have appeared since Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness and Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, but women bound together by ties more tenuous, though no less intense. Chums, as they used to be called.”
Which sounds rather pleasant, but to explore female friendships can also mean facing up to pain and cruelty. “Perhaps the reason it’s taken women novelists so long to get around to dealing with women’s friendships head-on is that betrayal by a woman friend is the ultimate betrayal,” says Atwood, concluding that, at least, “women’s friendships are now firmly on the literary map as valid and multidimensional novelistic material.”
Before reading too much into the fact that Cat’s Eye was published two years after that essay, it’s worth remembering that Atwood had started it years earlier and taken it up again, after observing the behaviours of her daughter, then a child, and her friends. Even so, this is a novel that has plenty to say about the “ultimate betrayal”, in which friendships quickly descend into bullying, ostracising, psychological and physical torture.
Curiously, when Cat’s Eye was published, three years after The Handmaid’s Tale, some critics took it as evidence that Atwood had “mellowed.” But that was more likely an indication of the devastating impact of her dystopian novel than of any softness found here. Cat’s Eye contains humour and loving descriptions of Canada and childhood, but it’s still brutal. Its fear and horror are arguably more powerful because they are born of everyday cruelties that strike close to home.
So close, in fact, that on its release Cat’s Eye was labelled an “anti-feminist” book. Atwood’s response to this, in an interview with Sally Brampton for the Guardian in 1989, was fascinating:
Any group that feels beleaguered also feels that you shouldn’t tell tales outside the group. You shouldn’t give the enemy any ammunition. On the other hand, that just puts a great deal of pressure on those who have stories to tell. And on those who think that only certain kinds of pain are legitimate, ie not theirs.”
Other critics called it “post-feminist”, to which Atwood had an even better answer: “Those who believe we are living in a post-feminist era are either sadly mistaken or tired of thinking about the whole thing.”
From our perspective 30 years on, it’s easy to see how right Atwood was. I’ve just started reading and can confirm that Cat’s Eye remains a vitally relevant experience – disturbing, but also hilarious. It promises to be a powerful book and I hope you’ll join me as we discuss it this month.
By way of further encouragement and thanks to Virago we have five copies of Cat’s Eye to give to the first five people from the UK to post “I want a copy please”, along with a nice, constructive suggestion in the comments section below. If you’re lucky enough to be one of the first to comment, email the lovely folk on culture.admin@theguardian.com, with your address and your account username.
