In my late teens and early 20s I read almost solely literary fiction, and in particular anything reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement or the broadsheets. This being before social media or Wikipedia, pretty much all I knew about each book would be one article I’d read in the paper. Back then I thought of Margaret Atwood as a literary fiction writer and I remember my surprise on discovering she also wrote brilliant science fiction.

These days I think of Atwood as primarily a writer of science, or speculative, fiction. So I experience the opposite surprise when I pick up one of her books that’s straightforward fiction. The Robber Bride was published in 1993, Atwood’s eighth novel, of which just one had been science fiction (The Handmaid’s Tale, 1985). It is loosely based on the folktale The Robber Bridegroom, but with all the major characters reimagined as women.

In October 1990 three old friends meet for lunch in Toronto. Roz, Charis and Tony met at college back in the 1960s, but the real reason they have stayed friends is Zenia – and their shared hatred of her. As they finish their lunch Zenia walks into the restaurant. Which is surprising as they held a funeral for her four and a half years ago, truly thinking her dead.

The narrative cuts between their three overlapping histories and their present. In rich detail we see the humdrum of everyday and some very much not everyday moments. Gradually we learn why these three women hate Zenia so vehemently.

“The story of Zenia is insubstantial, ownerless, a rumour only, drifting from mouth to mouth and changing as it goes. As with any magician, you saw what she wanted you to see; or else you saw what you yourself wanted to see. She did it with mirrors. The mirror was whoever was watching.”

Tony is a historian, specializing in war. She is serious, with her only comical or whimsical touch a habit of spelling words and even whole sentences backwards. She lives with her husband West, who also has a shared history with Zenia. When she can’t sleep she goes down to her basement to reconstruct historical battles. She’s quick to judge others but considers herself an astute judge of character – aside, that is, from the time she became best friends with Zenia.

Charis is a slightly dippy, floaty New Age type. She works part-time in a hippy shop but aside from work avoids going to the city, preferring to be in her falling-apart house on an island a ferry-ride away. She lives alone, with occasional visits from her grown daughter. She is overly trusting, with an abstract view of the world, which is perhaps surprising when we learn that she had the darkest childhood of the three friends.

Roz is a rich, successful businesswoman. She’s raising three children who – all being teenagers – mock her loud colours and constant redecorating. But she clings to the power she has now that she didn’t have earlier in life. She appears the least naive, most straightforward of the friends, and it’s harder to see how she was hoodwinked by Zenia.

“[Charis and Tony have] no street smarts at all, and Zenia is a street fighter. She kicks hard, she kicks low and dirty, and the only counterploy is to kick her first, with metal cleats on your boots. If there’s going to be knife play, Roz will have to depend on herself alone. She doesn’t need Tony’s analysis of knives through the ages or Charis’s desire not to discuss sharp items of cutlery because they are so negative. She just needs to know where the jugular is, so she can go for it.”

Zenia lies – that is all we really know for sure. She has told so many different stories about herself that almost nothing is certain. We don’t get flashbacks filling in Zenia’s past, we only see her through Roz, Charis and Tony. They all at one (or more) point considered her a good friend and were all betrayed.

Hatred is an odd foundation for friendship and I think what this novel really depicts is closer to chosen family. Like siblings or close cousins, these three women are different in almost every way but they have a strong bond based on their long, shared history. They know they can rely on each other at the worst of times, partly because they have seen each other at their lowest and worst.

“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 lengths, into decades and centuries. Nevertheless, for our purposes, we have to pretend that it does. The end of any history is a lie in which we all agree to conspire.”

The one thing I didn’t like about this book is that all three of the women’s grand betrayal stories revolve around men. While each history is complex, with Zenia’s approach tailored to the specific woman, they boil down to their men being “stolen” by Zenia. It’s the least feminist thing about the book by far.

I do think one interesting read of this book is that Zenia isn’t as evil as the three lead characters think she is. Sure, she lied. A lot. But the men she stole were pretty terrible – so was she in fact saving Roz, Charis and Tony, in her twisted way? Did she only come back because she needs money or because she never did decisively manage to break up Tony and West?

Either way, this is a brilliantly written book, with completely believable characters despite the fairytale inspiration. It’s definitely inspired me to go back and read more of Atwood’s early novels.

First published 1993 by Bloomsbury Publishing.

Source: secondhand bookshop.