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A review by irreverentreader
Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood
3.0
Clearly Margaret Atwood has aged like fine wine because I’ve now found two of her earlier novels distinctly lacking what has made me love her later works.
Lady Oracle is a book that has good bones but lacks in execution, especially towards the end. I honestly really enjoyed the deep dive into the main character’s (Joan) past, and found the whole tale of her childhood very raw, vulnerable, and believable. Messed up families and adult narrators telling stories about their childhood trauma always hits home. Had this stayed as the main focus of the story, I think this book would have been very successful.
Even once we get into Paul and Arthur, the book still works. Seeing how her upbringing affected her adult relationships was psychologically interesting. But once we introduce “The Royal Porcupine”, we take a decided turn for the worse. It is here we also get way into the weeds with the side characters of Sam and Marlene and their home grown terrorism. At this time, there gets to be so many plot points and things going on that Atwood ceases to manage them effectively.
I had so many questions. Why would Joan even be attracted to The Royal Porcupine? Why does Paul come back at all? Why the hell include the whole dynamite debacle at all? Also, maybe it was the time it was written in, but I didn’t believe that Joan was smart enough to fake her own death, successfully flee, and trick authorities. In the beginning of the book, I could identify and empathize with young Joan—she seemed real and I believed in her struggles. By the latter half, she just felt completely ridiculous and I couldn’t suspend my disbelief.
That leads me to the most annoying point of all—having just read Surfacing, it seems that Atwood likes to fall back on the standard that her female character can just go mad to wrap up the book. It felt so incredibly lazy after she had spent all this time building up to a climax that never came into existence. No questions are answered—which can be fine in this type of novel, but then it should have been left on a cliff hanger rather than making her fake death and flight to Italy completely worthless. It seemed like Atwood just couldn’t figure out how to wrap this one up and stopped caring, so I too lost all care and concern for the characters by the time we got to the overly rushed and busy ending.
Super disappointing from someone who usually enjoys her works greatly.
Lady Oracle is a book that has good bones but lacks in execution, especially towards the end. I honestly really enjoyed the deep dive into the main character’s (Joan) past, and found the whole tale of her childhood very raw, vulnerable, and believable. Messed up families and adult narrators telling stories about their childhood trauma always hits home. Had this stayed as the main focus of the story, I think this book would have been very successful.
Even once we get into Paul and Arthur, the book still works. Seeing how her upbringing affected her adult relationships was psychologically interesting. But once we introduce “The Royal Porcupine”, we take a decided turn for the worse. It is here we also get way into the weeds with the side characters of Sam and Marlene and their home grown terrorism. At this time, there gets to be so many plot points and things going on that Atwood ceases to manage them effectively.
I had so many questions. Why would Joan even be attracted to The Royal Porcupine? Why does Paul come back at all? Why the hell include the whole dynamite debacle at all? Also, maybe it was the time it was written in, but I didn’t believe that Joan was smart enough to fake her own death, successfully flee, and trick authorities. In the beginning of the book, I could identify and empathize with young Joan—she seemed real and I believed in her struggles. By the latter half, she just felt completely ridiculous and I couldn’t suspend my disbelief.
That leads me to the most annoying point of all—having just read Surfacing, it seems that Atwood likes to fall back on the standard that her female character can just go mad to wrap up the book. It felt so incredibly lazy after she had spent all this time building up to a climax that never came into existence. No questions are answered—which can be fine in this type of novel, but then it should have been left on a cliff hanger rather than making her fake death and flight to Italy completely worthless. It seemed like Atwood just couldn’t figure out how to wrap this one up and stopped caring, so I too lost all care and concern for the characters by the time we got to the overly rushed and busy ending.
Super disappointing from someone who usually enjoys her works greatly.