My exploration into Canadian Literature continues with Margaret Atwood's third novel, Lady Oracle. The novel is a wonderfully inventive, textured and comic exploration into the life of the novel's central character, Joan Foster. As fellow Canadian author Mordecai Richler once described, Lady Oracle is "a wonderfully unpretentious comic romp... a fine novel: inventive, funny and a pleasure to read."

The novel really appealed to me because of its many insights into the amazingly complex and accessible character of Joan Foster. A young 30-something writer of chip-dip literature, Joan Foster struggles through the many turmoils of a depressing and socially traumatic childhood, into the many twists and turns of adulthood. Atwood exposes Joan's life story in a very funny and at times very touching first person point of view. As a result, the novel seamlessly winds between the past and the present and from Canada to Europe, giving us many comic tid-bits that add up to a wonderful whole in the end. And it is through this life long journey that Atwood paints a picture of a life that has been rejected in so many ways, but still continues to recreate itself to find a deeper meaning in life.

Lady Oracle is the first novel I've read that actually brought tears to my eyes. In a scene that could easily be taken from an Atwood novel itself, tears came to my eyes while I stood in the aisle of a grocery store, while my Mother busily shopped. And, in what is probably the climax for all the inner-fear and frustration our central character has felt, I read...

"There's a magic in love and smiles. Use them every day, in all you do, and see what wonderful things happen," Brown Owl used to say chirpily, reading it from her little book. I'd believed that slogan, I'd believed that the absence of wonderful things happening had been due to my own failure, my insufficient love. Now it seemed to me that the name of a furniture polish could be substituted for "love" in this maxim without at all violating its meaning. Love was merely a tool, smiles were another tool, they were both just pools for accomplishing certain ends. No magic, merely chemicals. I felt I'd never really loved anyone, not Paul, not Chuck the Royal Porcupine, not even Arthur. I'd polished them with my love and expected them to shine, brightly enough to return my own reflection, enhanced and sparkling."

This one paragraph single handedly juxtaposes something I'm sure many of us have felt, and that is the contradictions between how life should be with how it really is, especially for those of us who have been abused and tormented by life's journey. And in respect to this theme, Lady Oracle is Atwood's grandest novel yet, strongly hitting home the point that you can't run away from your problems and that you can't fix things in others as a way of being able to try and fix yourself. It's comic and at the same time tragic, in that Joan's own writing may be what leads to her own ultimate downfall. In the end, the novel suggests that you have to look within your own self to fine a more secure and heightened place in the world. And for that message alone, Lady Oracle is an amazing piece of literature.

My only real complaint with the novel is that it ends so suddenly. It does tie everything together as it should, leaving the central character on fairly solid ground with hope for her own future being left in the hearts and minds of readers. But I felt like the novel could have continued on into a fourth part. But in the end, to do so would have probably violated the character's inner journey, one that by the end had already climaxed and was now well on its way towards an inner healing.

Grade: A -

(c) July 13, 2002, Steven H. Lee

Atwood's Novel Oeuvre Reviewed...

7. Cat's Eye
6. The Handmaid's Tale
5. Bodily Harm
4. Life Before Man
3. Lady Oracle
2. Surfacing
1. The Edible Woman






Recommended: Yes