Surfacing by Margaret Atwood
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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A young woman takes a double-date to her childhood home in rural Canada after her father goes missing. [OK, “double-date” sounds a bit trivial for the tone of the novel, but it’s the quickest way to say that she goes with her boyfriend, Joe, and a married couple, David and Anna.] At first all is well, and the four are enjoying time away from the city, living in a cabin on an island in beautiful lake country. In fact, the group decides to extend their stay, and — intriguingly — this decision isn’t advanced by the protagonist, who’s father remains missing, but one of the others who is enjoying the novelty of back-country living. During this extension, tensions rise within the group, both within each couple and between the couples.

In the third part of this three-part book, the protagonist descends into a feral madness. Her father’s disappearance, which the protagonist addresses with the stoicism of one accustomed to living in remote territory, is only one of several triggers. We discover that she was divorced, she’d been on the outs with her parents in relation to that marriage, and that her current relationship is falling apart because Joe wants to get serious but the protagonist wants to keep things casual – presumably because of the trauma of her last marriage.

As the novel progresses, we get little indications of what might have been responsible for her father’s disappearance, though the reader doesn’t have a good grasp on whether there is merit to the speculated motives, or whether they are just indication that the protagonist is beginning to lose a grip. We discover that there are parties interested in purchasing the property. Some vitriol is spoken over the fact that the prospective buyers are American, but we don’t know whether that reflects a reasonable curiosity about why foreigners would be interested in such a remote property or whether it’s the madness or whether it’s just a visceral dislike of Americans. It also seems like the protagonist may be on the trail of some sort of artifact and that her father may have left her clues about it. However, again, we don’t know whether this is all the crazed imagings of a person descending into madness.

This is a short, quiet novel, but it was nevertheless engrossing. A lot of the intrigue is packed into the very end of the novel, but as it’s a short novel that doesn’t mean that there’s and excessively long build. The protagonist’s madness offers nice opportunities for strategic ambiguity – i.e. the reader has some freedom to determine what is true and what is paranoia.

I read this as part of a personal project to read a piece of literature that offers insight into a country for every country that I’ve visited. I think it fits the bill nicely. The reader sees a little bit of what life in rural Canada is like. The reader also witnesses some of the conflict over language and nationalism as this takes place in predominantly French-speaking territory, and the protagonist has been living away long enough that her language marks her as an outsider — even though this is where she’s from. We also see how Canadians can feel an intense difference between themselves and people from the United States, even though much of the world sees Canadians as “the polite Americans.”

I’d highly recommend this book for fiction readers.

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