Moral Disorder / by Margaret Atwood

Toronto native Margaret Atwood is not only one of Canadian literature's best authors, she's become something of a worldwide phenomenon duringher three-to-four decades long tenure as a truly recognizable talent. As a poet, novelist and short story writer, her insightful, sardonic voice is at once mysterious and lucid, her prose and arrangement of words an evocative display of brilliant art. Her 2006 semi-autobiographical novel (written in short story form) Moral Disorder is no exception to her long line of superior work. A thinkpiece and generational purview of life, love, fate and existence, the book reflects Atwood's one-of-a-kind take on the western tradition.

The initial, uneventful but precursory tale lays the framework which the rest will follow. Nell & Tig are an elderly couple at first seen discussing some sobering news over breakfast--it seems some Middle Eastern terrorist have murdered several war hostages--and though they're evidently concerned about it, the pair are visibly and emotionally distant, their own lives too much encumbered by their own misunderstood concerns and weighted anxieties. While this relatively subdued scene resonates mostly the external turmoil of the encircling world, that's exactly what the world internally is like for Nell--a mentally exhausted attitude of despondency and hapless emotion towards her life and the people in it.

The accompanying stories and episodes present a swirl Nell's life, both past and present, looking back on her childhood and young adulthood, her tentative teenage relationships and first job as a freelance editor. Things are fastforwarded to when Nell meets Oona, a life-wearied woman with two children and married to Tig; Nell soon after becomes the "second wife" amid fluctuating reactions. Nell's world is one of incohesion and relational dissonance, evoking a life bonded together by an isolated, soulless web of "moral disorder". Swooping back and forth in time and soberly assessing everything from fashion to children to social upheaval and inflation, Atwood's stories are as absorbing as they are dismal, extracting a gripping morbidity with both empathy and remote interest. (FIC ATWOOD)