Customer Reviews

Moral Disorder

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Related to this book and the protagonist in so many ways and on so many levels. Another great from the queen of fiction.

It is a real pleasure to see how Atwood's novels develop and change with times. Unlike many authors, she only gets better with each novel. Her novels are fresh, innovative and original. She is able to reinvent her fiction with each new publication, giving the reader something fresh, current and original with every new work. This collection of short stories is fabulous - Atwood at her best.

This collection of stories, Atwood's first since Bluebeard's Egg, is a solid, but not exceptional, work by Canada's most famous writer. Atwood is not as strong on literary craft as, for example, Alice Munro, who has also lately produced a collection of semi-autobiographical stories. Atwood has always been content to get across her ideas, which are central to her writing, and it is her ideas or "message" that tend to take precedence over craft. Even so, these stories are interesting and varied. Although it is risky to assume that the first person narrator can be equated to the author (this is generally not true, though the first person narrator is often quite similar to the author), one can certainly gain some insights into Atwood's experiences growing up with her father and mother and much younger sister from these stories. The first story is the only one that mentions the Roman Empire, and here the transition is a bit forced, although the point is well-taken (that our situation is comparable to life in the late Roman Empire). I was a little bothered by the way the two boys in the title story, "Moral Disorder"--the sons of Tig--are never given names or differentiated, not even once. They are always described as "the boys", as though they existed and acted like a single unit in the eyes of the narrator, Nell, and hence in the eyes of the author as well. But apart from these objections, the collection is an absorbing and worthwhile read.

This collection of dull short stories has been so over-edited in a subtractive way, that any literary contents within have been pulverized. It appears to be an exercize in control and anal retentiveness, relying on facile shifts of perspective, that are supposed to justify very ordinary literature. In the first story, the author starts with Nell's story as an elderly, (possibly influenced by the begnning of Titanic the James Cameron Movie) and then exposes us to long and languid segments about every detail of her life. The last two pages of the story are supposed to justify this marathon of deliberate crawling, yet the shift from Nell and her husband to the Roman Empire is just as immobile, and a bit Hollywoody. Most of the book continues on in a format of short stories with Nell as the central character, gets better a bit towards the end, and then fizzles away like the Roman Empire.