Surfacing, Margaret Atwood

Surfacing is a short read, only 208 pages. Don't be deceived by this cover with its depiction of the clean, controlled body of the woman. My copy was printed in the 70's and is much more indicative of the nature of the book. Mine depicts a woman in her late 20's, paddling a canoe with a bright pink evening sun behind her, her face covered by her paddling arm. In the novel, the heroin stays strangely hidden. We never know her name. The writing is choppy, not always finished, so that we experience the heroin's thoughts with her.
The woman leaves the city, presumably Toronto, with her lover, Joe, his friend David, and David's wife, Anna. Set in the late 60's, early 70's, we quickly get a feel for the anti-American, anti-capitalist sentiment popular of the time. They drive then boat to the woman's childhood home in rural Quebec, where her father has recently gone missing. The woman's intent is to find her father, whom she hasn't spoken to in years, and who she secretly feels is still alive. Her mother died a few years ago, and her older brother is surveying in the Australian Outback. To the group, parents are embarrassments. "They all disowned their parents long ago, the way you are supposed to", she says. "Joe never mentions his mother and father, Anna says hers were nothing people and David calls his The Pigs". The cabin is extremely secluded, impossible to reach safely without knowledge of the area. When the boat delivers the group onto the dock, the woman looks for signs of her father. After a thorough search of the house, she comes across a map and drawings, nonsensical shapes, like fish, but with antlers, like human, but with too many appendages. She discovers these are studies of cave drawings in the area. Obsessed with finding her parents, we get the first impression she could be mad. While exploring a site marked on the map, she has a vision of first her father, then drowned brother, then her aborted child. She becomes more and more drawn to the land, to the plants and animals, believing herself to literally be one of them, and less and less attached to her friends. As a full week plays out, the relationships become unfixibly soiled, and the woman, convinced the friends are plotting to trap her like an animal and take her back to the city, runs to the woods. There, her madness cannot be mitigated by the rationality of human contact, and the woman gives into it.
It is a difficult book to get into, because unlike many novels, the narrator does not take time to explain to the reader all of her thoughts. They happen and we have to keep up. But despite its abrasive nature, I found myself drawn into her head, feeling her fear and madness incredibly palpably. It is very expressive of political, social, ecological and moral values, and hauntingly written. Not my favourite Atwood, but I'd give it 7/10.