Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood is a novel about paintings—and even resembles one in its stillness. It’s also about the young girl who’ll create those paintings, currently growing up in late-1980s Toronto, nine years old and badly startled by the contrast between city life and her previous life in the northern Ontario woods with her family.
In the dainty civilized streets of Toronto, Elaine encounters the trio figures of Carol, Cordelia, and Grace, the girls who will constantly resurface and haunt the rest of her tweenhood with their subtle bullying. But even Elaine denies that it’s bullying—at first. There is no blatant verbal or physical violence, and Atwood makes these ten-year-olds constantly walk the fine line between harassment and a subtler, more unnameable manipulation. It’s eerie because often they don’t sound like ten-year-olds but more like older women inhabiting their bodies. Maybe it’s because our first direct exposure to social ostracization has the effect of making us—or them—seem older.
As sensitively as Cat’s Eye explores the young complex dimensions of the relationship between Elaine and Cordelia, which is later subverted, I didn’t know how to feel about the nonlinear nature of time in the book. Elaine’s adulthood and childhood so often glitched back and forth that it felt like two eras fighting for my attention. Neither did I enjoy the unresolved nature of Elaine’s childhood drama. There’s a lot that happened, and even more that was unsaid, I assume, but Elaine receives very little recognition of the experiences she endured. In fact, she blocks much of it out herself.
But to be fair, the book does open with a sort of disclaimer about how time can warp experience: “Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space.”
Stephen, Elaine’s older brother, told her this as a child. And Cat’s Eye ends up being about this idea, after all, how an artist can manipulate depth and dimension in their work to create illusions and tricks, and even retrieve memories from the past, which we have blocked out as adults, but lurk in our subconscious. Elaine is now an artist; once she was manipulated by others, but now she herself holds power to manipulate—not much, but at least in the little world of her paintings.
And—as we find out toward the end—Elaine’s paintings are microcosms of chapters of her life, as we are guided through them one by one. The most haunting one is a self-portrait titled “Cat’s Eye,” in which three young girls watch her from a distance. It is Elaine’s return to childhood, which was a tiny universe of its own with jealousies, secret joys, possessiveness, and growing pains.
Elaine always cherished a glass marble in her purse during her childhood, which is the real namesake of this novel: named Cat’s Eye for the bit of blue at its center. This book, then, is also a marvel at how—nonsensically and sentimentally—the entire world of childhood can be preserved within a glass marble. Many of us, as adults, choose to toss it out. But others, like Elaine, find it rolled to the back of their desk drawer, pick it up between two fingers, and peer inside.
