BBC Book Club .- Cat's eyes by Margaret Atwood

hello this is James Doherty and here's a program from the book club archive first broadcast in 1999 welcome to book club and to a writer who's 11 novels have all been bestsellers someone was managed to bridge that sometimes troublesome divide between what's known as serious fiction and the popular book so Margaret Atwood is a most welcome guest to talk with a group of readers hear about her novel cat's eye I hope you've been reading it at home and that you'll feel part of our circle here in Broadcasting House later of course I'll be sending you off with next month's book cat's eye is a story about families and friendship and it's also a story about time because it's driven by memories sudden recollections and the powerful forces of long-forgotten childhood crises Elaine Risley a painter tells the story of her psychological and physical tussle with a friend Cordelia when they're children it is a struggle for power for dominance and it calls in their families who inflict lasting wounds on the friends margaret atwood welcome indeed can i ask you the most obvious question about the book but it seems to me to be a very pertinent question about a book that is so gripping in so many ways what in the end do you think cat's eye is about well if I have to choose one I'd probably say it's about little girls are not made of sugar and spice and everything nice some of us may have suspected this long ago but you don't often find it in books even in books for written for little girls who usually have the best friend and then the worst enemy but in real life these are often the same person did you tie with the idea of making the ending happier no no it wouldn't have been good it wouldn't have been actually were it wouldn't have been accurate did you wonder how readers would feel at the end was that in your mind or did this simply feel to you to be the natural way of coming to the the sort of balance sheet in the emotions very painful emotions that her a sort of gone through in the book well as Lana who is the biographer of Henry James said if it's a novel there's a clock in it in other words all novels have to do with time and and the passing of time and this one begins with time and then it ends with time and part of what you're doing when you're telling yourself the story of your life is you're coming to terms with time and what I remember is my great aunt who was by the end of her life very old and she was she was blind and she was bedridden and she was very nice lady and people went to her and said you know what do you do all day in this bed and you can't say you can't read she said well I am telling myself the story of my life and when I get to the end I will close the book and I think we do this ourselves at various points in our in our lives except that the story is different in other words your retrospective when you're looking back over your life and your 20 things are going to look quite different from the way they look when you're 30 when you're 40 when you're 50 and when you're 60 you know I finally finally gotten around to forgiving a few people that I held things against for some time so I think you do this throughout in life and this is one point at which Elaine is doing this and I assume she's now resolved some of her past history with Cornelia and she can get on with something else let me bring people in here because I think the perhaps we plunge into the question of the characters involved which you know fascinating gripping characters and they deep characters this whole question of time the structure the way the book is organized as we know is that it it moves not in a linear fashion but it takes you back it takes you forward sometimes quite slowly sometimes quite fast it made me think about novels condensing time because because she has to think back through a long time to remember what happened we only have to remember back hundred pages so we go through privileged access don't we to her life do you feel privileged to know a great deal about her life you can't say no this is by thousands it reminds me so much my own life and I'm not Canadian and they don't work as an artist but it the details are so powerful they ever occur to you to make you lean into a different sort of artist a musician or a writer which might have been a more obvious choice yes maybe it did occur but one of my unlived lives as a visual artist so I suppose I was acting out let's talk about Alain who is the narrator in the book who takes us back to these painful tussles as I said some psychological but some physical I mean she was buried sort of Bennet alive in a dark hole as a child what do people feel about Alain let's talk about nasty little girls you must be amazed that the letters I got on this people had had much worse things done to them and they weren't all girls either some of them were voice astounding things in fact I wish I had the letters first do you think that there is a fundamental difference between the ways in which girls and boys bully each other yes you can back me up or not on this but it seems to me that the structures of the little boys societies are more hierarchical and more stable and more based on observable external things such as who is good at football or who has the biggest stamp collection or something like that whereas the girls their allegiances tend to shift around a lot and not be based on anything you could necessarily point out it's not the biggest it's not the prettiest it's not the smartest you just don't know and and all of a sudden the person who is number one on Wednesday the others will have all got together behind your back and decided they're going to demote her and you never know quite what that is based on the structure provides some sort of security for the boys and the girls well I don't think it provides security for the boy at the bottom of it so in one way it's more stable but in in another way it can be less hopeful if you're stuck in a fairly low position on the pecking order do you think boys are allowed to be unconventional more than I don't think they're necessarily unconventional I think they're they're more likely to be physical they will have it out in a physical way and a lot of pushing and shoving and fights on them maybe this doesn't go on anymore but one thing I have noticed from reading the newspaper is that this is now getting more into girls behavior than it is to and there's more physicality and more some quite violent things you read about in in the newspaper which may have always been there and just not revealed the whole issue of blame and victims blaming themselves seems really important in the novel and even with the death of Steven really Elaine seems to spend her whole life thinking it's my fault you know it serves her right is the phrase that keeps coming up what was it about her well I wouldn't say her whole life at all in fact there's a switch over when they hit adolescence and she becomes actually the more dominant figure she's able to get round Cordelia in in quite a vicious way in point of fact he gets her own back so I don't think it's um something very wrong with her though doesn't she she you know she well judging from the mail one receives and also the articles one has read these kinds of experiences in childhood do manka lasting impression and for a long time people chose Freudian point of view everything is determined by the time you're 5 well that's been thrown out the window we always knew it was wrong anyway and people are taking a much harder look at quotes peer groups and the children that you know who are your age and who either you do terrible things to them or they do terrible things to you I've met a zillion people who said I was Elaine I've only met two who ever said I was Cordelia discrepency they're similar we all forget the awful things we've done the casual observer might have wondered given your obvious sympathy for your female characters and and for women in generally in your feminism how that squares with the very malign nasty unpleasant aspects of particularly of Cordelia that you show so so clearly and compellingly how do you reconcile those that that on that unpleasant portrayal with the the feminist aspect with the feminist aspect that everybody ascribed to me and nobody ever defines what I want together okay my interest as a writer is in characters of either sex or any gender who are fully rounded human beings and one thing that was done to women repeatedly and still gets done to them in the 19th century is that they were divided into angels on the one hand and hores on the other and you had to be one of the other but you couldn't be a human being you know that middle ground was occupied by by men and as far as I'm concerned women are human beings and some of them are very nice and some of them aren't and some of them are nice sometimes and not on Wednesdays and some of them are nice and relation to some people in their lives and not in relation to others just like real people so I think my interest as a writer is is in people who function the way people actually function in real life and not in showing women as perfect or angels are better or wonderful always right I felt in a second husband been and also Elaine's children are quite shadowy and I assume that was for a purpose is it because of the balance of the book or the book isn't about them I think they're there to show that yes she does have a real life and she has gotten as far away from her past as she possibly can she's gone to the west coast of Canada which is very far away from from Toronto and there she has a life but it can never be fully filled in life I guess you could call it that it a compromised life do you well I think it's it's real and its own terms it's just not totally multi-dimensional so she sold out when she married then no I don't think she sold out at all I think that people make choices in adult life that are perfectly reasonable and perfect viable and perfectly fine they don't have the intensity of things that happen in childhood because unless you happen to be caught in a war or something like that things that happen to you as an adult often don't have the intensity of childhood because childhood is extremely intense it's the first time for everything you have no experience you've got nothing to fall back on and you're surrounded by giants it's difficult that actually maybe explains a question that we had she says it's much easier to forgive men than women and we wondered why is it because she was tougher when they heard her I think men find it is here to forgive women yeah and I think the reason for that is that if it's somebody like you you expect more of them Stephen pops into my mind at this point and the brother who dies the scientist I mean how does he fit into the mosaic I found Stephen I was able to compare him very a bit in my own brother some people have said that he wasn't well defined and he had the relationship that Gillian had with her brother was identical to the one I had with mine and I found him to be a wonderful character as I did the father as well because that was there but not there do you think that her life convenient she had a sister I think her life would have been very different if she had a sister I think one of her her problems with these little girls is she's never been around other little girls in fact she has been more socialized as a boy then as a little girl so she doesn't understand there deviousness and hypocrisy when she tell us some of the thinking behind Stephens dying in the way he did whether it was a random event or why why you kept but then you know the older you get the more people just die I mean it is the most amazing thing and they don't do it often in the way that they do it in in books with a nice long buildup in the death scene and everybody gets together and forgives each other and things like that they just suddenly die these days they're more likely to die and random violent events so is it part of trying to make sense of things and actually not being able to well I think it's one of those holes in time time in the book is not like a railway track it's very lumpy and that is in fact how we experience time you can go for days and days with nothing much happening and then bang a sudden suddenly there is an event and something just falls off a cliff or through the floor and it just explodes and lasts life is not orderly art is an attempt to make order out of it but it does not by any means always succeed given that that view of time is one of the organizing principles of the book let me ask you just to read the very beginning of chapter one which establishes that concept of time and the way it works in the book this is the very beginning time is not a line but a dimension like the dimensions and space if you can bend space you can bend time also and if you knew enough and could move faster than light you could travel backwards in time and exist in two places at once it was my brother Stephen who told me that when he wore his raveling maroon sweater to study in and spend a lot of time standing on his head so that the blood would run down into his brain and nourish it I didn't understand what he meant but maybe he didn't explain it very well he was already moving away from the imprecision of words but I began then to think of time as having a shape something you could see like a series of liquid transparencies one laid on top of another you don't look back a long time but down through it like water sometimes this comes to the surface sometimes that sometimes nothing nothing goes away I was really fascinated how you managed to recall the minut details of childhood so successfully and I just wondered whether this is something that you've always been able to do whether you had to do a lot of research into certain aspects of childhood in Canada at that time I've always been able to do it but also I do research just to make sure that I'm right and I had a I once had a wonderful employer called this is Mary Simms is still alive and I just went to her 90th birthday party and she wrote me a letter just recently because we still write letters and I still go see her she's quite wonderful and she said I've always suspected that you were nearsighted as a child and astigmatic she said because I was and although cows and trades featured in my childhood landscapes ants and you know shelves and stones were much much clearer to me and if you are nearsighted and astigmatic you did say things up very close and very very clearly you know I could see the weave on machine I could see the actual threads but I wouldn't necessarily be able to see way down the road and this wasn't discovered until I was 12 so had it kind of foggy few years there and it might have something to do with that and it might have something to do with the rusk and experience and the Ruskin experience was that he was brought up by his mother not allowed to have any toys and his toys were the pattern in the carpet and a bunch of keys I was a child in the 40s when there weren't many toys around I didn't have many and we were you know up in the woods away from a lot of variety of stimulus that means that you do record very clearly the things that are there so it might have something to do with that I'm not sure I've got to ask about turn Stephen because that after those fantastic descriptions of their life together their family life they've both uprooted and put into this alien environment and yet season on the surface survives whereas Elaine is bullied and that's what I was I was getting out and I said did you think that men or boys are allowed to be unconventional whereas girls have got to be conventional this particular book happens to be about Elaine mostly she's the narrator Stephen anyway is is off in another dimension most of the time scientists and scientists seem to be quite well insulated from certain kinds of things that are important to other people such as what folks think of them and I think you're only really vulnerable to that kind of thing that happens to Elaine if you're worried about what people think of you that's how she's got at Steven doesn't care right on the first page he's got a raveling maroon sweater and he's standing on his head cats eye is also very heavily about place it describes Canada in those beautiful terms but do you what do you think is more important as an influence that the genetic influence of Elaine's family or the environment because one might feel that the infant's of her parents might have sustained her whereas in fact she wasn't sustained through on her traumas and troubles but she does come out all right she comes out better than Cordelia does for instance but your question is nature versus nurture and we seem to be concluding in our infinite wisdom as a society that it's 50% of each you try to show that it's easy to forge an identity for women in contemporary Canada than it was say back in the the post-war era of Elaine's girlhood one thinks for example of mrs. Smith and her very restricted domestic ambit of life well mrs. Smith certainly has an identity it may not be one you would wish to spend much time around but you can't say she doesn't have one so I know I don't think it's that a doll you know as I say Elaine actually comes out fairly well she survives her experiences she gets back at Cordelia she becomes an artist too successful about what more do you want it seemed to me that um the Protestant tradition which does the Smith move now poor shopping is set against some Catholic themes in what the state at the appearance of the Virgin as she thinks through a name and there's also her red purse which reminds me anyway of the Sacred Heart oh I'm remembered and yet religion many seems to disappear from the second books so it does tend to doesn't know I think it comes back it's there in the last scene but it of course it has and in the same at the bridge with with Cordelia of course it does in that childhood way because that childhood way is very imagistic and based on strange perceptions again like most things in childhood it's very intense and why are the Catholic things more alluring well it's because the Protestant ones are so deeply unalloyed and at least this is at least this other one has a nice lady in it which cannot be said of the Smiths entourage now this is not a statement about religion it's a statement about certain images and experiences in a novel I was a struck by the contrast in faiths between Cordelia and Elaine and I wondered whether that was actually because in a in succeeds in becoming an artist and whether that is in fact in a way her salvation well let's think of Cordelia's family Cordelia is the youngest of three sisters that the two older ones give her a terrible time which she then passes on to Elaine and she also has it fairly verbally violent anyway father I mean she is not having a happy home life and it is often so if you observe these groups of little girls and I was a summer camp counselor and I had a Saturday morning group and I had a daughter and I taught in schools and all the rest of it I had a hard look at them but the one doing the bullying is actually the one is having a bad time at home the bullying is way of acting out and getting some power back but there's some cracks in the armor underneath all of all of that I've seen Stevens that fits into our pattern doesn't it there's a lot of people in the book suffering from other people's unhappiness and he reality shot yes because of that it gets passed around and people indeed like very much to pass it around can I ask you something that struck me which is not as profound a question as some of the ones we've just had how did you tumble on the idea of the cat's-eye itself the marble as the kind of prism through which all this was going to flow because it's a wonderful physical center for all these sort of emotions that are whirling around in the book you can almost see it sort of you know as a kind of backward crystal ball up until about I think 1965 there was a childhood culture which I think had remained more or less permanent and moralized passed on from children to children - children for many generations and involved games and songs and things that were done on the playground and sayings and part of this culture was marbles and they were highly desirable objects it was considered very bad form to actually buy any you were supposed to win them and it was something that girls and boys could both play and you could both be good at and you could then become quite high on the totem pole if you had got hold of everybody else's marbles especially the valuable ones and the cat song was not the most valuable one but I would say it was a second so there's this commerce going on amongst children and adults really didn't have much to do with so I was familiar with marbles and I was very keen on them I wasn't very good at but I was very keen on them so it was a natural kind of object for me the cat's eye in England also means the things that go down the middle of the road to show the way so I like that they light up in the dark we don't have them in Canada because you can't have them with Frost they just pop out of the road so I like that and for the artists of course it's the third eye we've all wondered if when you were writing you had a picture of the fully formed Cordelia you know the adult Cordelia and where she'd gone obviously you know the reconciliation works really well for roseola Delia is dead do you know why why well because I think that's what either this is my own opinion yeah there are Canaris for you told you Oh we worried about it there I would you know she worried some person yeah one ought to worry about her but there are pseudo Cordelia's that appear in each of the now sections Elaine keeps bumping into people but might be Cordelia or they whisk around the corner and they're not Cordelia or they're a bag lady and they might be Cordelia but they aren't so she's expecting to come upon Cordelia at any moment but she doesn't and the fact that she doesn't come upon the really real Cordelia indicates to me that Cordelia is now as my friend and California says on another plane of existence do you think she would have forgiven her if she hasn't she has forgiven her by the end of the book I know she forgave but I mean if she actually met her physically I think she was you forgive her then as well good thanks make me feel better how do you feel where do you hear people discussing these characters as people with feelings with pasts with futures when you have to think of an answer but you've created the universe in which they move and every feeling they have so I suppose I feel deeply praised an author's honest statement which is a very happy moment at which to end thank you very much Margaret Atwood for being our guest and book club this month thank you all at home for joining this month's readers in the studio who include students from huyclef comprehensive in Dorset for our discussion about cats I which I do hope you enjoyed next month another treat we're going to read snow falling on Cedars by David Goodison it's a thriller and in a way and elegy a real story and we'll talk about that on book club on the first Sunday of June that's the sixth of June at the usual time of four o'clock now remember if you want to join us here you can write to us at book club BBC Broadcasting House London w1a 1a a or you can send us an email at book club at BBC co uk hearing from you keep them coming so with our thanks to Margaret Atwood and to all of you until next month and the next book goodbye [Applause] we hope you've enjoyed this radio 4 podcast you can find hundreds of other programs of BBC code at UK for word slash radio for

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Length: 26min 46sec (1606 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 01 2017