Lisa's Reviews > The Robber Bride

"Every ending is arbitrary, because the end is where you write The end. A period, a dot of punctuation, a point of stasis. A pinprick in the paper: you could put your eye to it and see through, to the other side, to the beginning of something else. Or, as Tony says to her students, Time is not a solid, like wood, but a fluid, like water or the wind. It doesn't come neatly cut into even-sized length, into decades and centuries. Nevertheless, for our purposes we have to pretend it does. The end of any history is a lie in which we all agree to conspire."

And I have to admit that closing this novel, I thought that was the end of it. I liked it, in the way a mouse likes the beauty of a snake while knowing it doesn't have the weapons to fight it properly and will be devoured at a whim. But I thought I would not return to it ever again after escaping this study in everyday evil. And yet - I return in thoughts. More often than to other Atwood novels, actually, even though I would claim to like them more. This is not the Atwood I recommend to others. That would be Cat's Eye, The Handmaid's Tale, The Penelopiad or MaddAddam.

But Zenia never left my mind. That woman-snake, that evil demon, that narcissistic destructor of happiness and calm. She walked away, lost interest in me for bigger prey, but I remained paralysed in front of her image.

What is it that makes genuinely good and caring people fall for evil characters, bow to their charisma, do their bidding despite themselves? There is no proper answer, no satisfying END to that eternal human conundrum, and that is Atwood's message, her reflection on Steinbeck's Kate in East of Eden or on Zola's La Bête humaine. And yet, Zenia is worse in many ways because she is so common. She is scary because she is omnipresent. And because she is so good at what she is doing.

She picks the people that are asking to be hurt.

In the beginning, there was prey ... and the creator saw that they needed a predator. So she made one. And she saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning, the first chapter. And as long as storytelling is eternal, there will be no end:

"The end of any history is a lie in which we all agree to conspire."

THE END!