Once Upon a Time: The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood

In a word: Wow! I’m dropping this book into the fairy tale category thanks in part to a wonderful post by Buried in Print who first put me onto the notion that Atwood is playing with fairy tale motifs. What absolute fun it was to discover a hidden (much like the dense forests of fairy tales) level of meaning beneath this literary novel. Even the title is an allusion to a fairy tale (that I’d never heard of) called “The Robber Bridegroom“.

Cinderfella, this is not. Remember that silly (but sorta fun) gender bending film with Jerry Lewis? As the gender flipped title implies, The Robber Bride is the tale of Zenia (ghost or no?) returning from the dead to haunt the lives of three former dorm-mates—Roz, Catholic-Jewish poor girl/rich girl; Tony, diminutive chronicler of war history; and Charis, earth-child dreamer with a troubled past—whose lovers Zenia had earlier stolen and whose lives she had irrevocably affected. The narrative moves in fractured time from post-Iraq War I to college years to childhood and back. The narrator layers the intertwining stories with such exquisite detail that the reader knows exactly how each character’s life primed her for Zenia’s plunder.

And who exactly is Zenia? Is she dead? Is she a ghost? Hard to say. Is she deceitful, manipulative? Yes, yes. Is she the evil, uninvited godmother of Charis’s imaginings who wreaks havoc on domestic bliss? Oh, but each of our heroines invited her, for Zenia is a charismatic truthshaper. Picture the evil queen from Snow White as she transforms into the kindly crone bearing fruit.

And that brings us back to the fairy tale thread. Thanks to the tip from Buried In Print, I read this book with an eye to dark whimsy. I discovered Tony living “in a tower” away “from the land of the giants,” Charis loving a man “odd as unicorns,” Roz intoning “Mirror, mirror on the wall/ Who is the evilest of us all?” and, of course, Zenia embodying the “dark godmother’ whose shadow “falls over the cradle.”

Ultimately, The Robber Bride is a testament to the strength and loyalty of women (think girlfriend book for grownups), a metafictional treatise on the elusive nature of truth, and a really fun re-imagining of the fairytale. And along the way, like Grettel’s breadcrumbs the author scatters jewels of language as when Zenia’s “perfume trails behind her like the smoke from an insolent cigar” (102).

Buy this book. (Ahem, appearances to the contrary, I am not related to Margaret Atwood.) Read. Re-read.