Surfacing, Atwood’s second novel, is an elusive narrative. Ostensibly it is a simple story – after a long absence an unnamed narrator returns to her childhood home in the remote Canadian countryside to try and find her missing father. Her boyfriend, Joe, and a married couple, Anna and David, complete the group. The homecoming is uneasy – despite being familiar the setting feels alien and disturbing. On arrival at the family home there is no obvious sign of her father. The group agrees to stay for a week and turn the visit into a short, back to nature holiday. Tensions between each couple slowly emerge – David belittles Anna, who tells the narrator that he is a philanderer who objectifies women – for example he insists that she always wears makeup. The narrators relationship with Joe is equally strained.

Time is whiled away in fairly banal tasks – they go blueberry-picking, fishing and swimming, weed the vegetable patch and play board games. The women do the bulk of the domestic tasks. The narrator’s mental state slowly deteriorates and the narrative begins to fragmented. Sentences become short and disjointed, and eventually incoherent. The narrator is haunted by memories of her marriage, her child, and the abortion she was pushed into having. Her increasing sense of paranoia is fuelled by David’s constant references to an impending American invasion of Canada, which she treats entirely seriously. She sees hidden messages from her parents in every day objects around the house, and cannot decide if he is really alive or dead. Meanwhile David and Joe are making a modernist film, Random Samples, which is really just a collage of miscellaneous scenes. This again emphasises the narrator’s sense of alienation, making her feel like a performer rather than a real person with her own identity.

The novel draws to a climax when both men attempt unsuccessfully to pressurise the narrator into having sex with them – when rebuffed they sulk. This may have been the final trigger for the narrator’s descent into a full blown psychotic episode. She destroys David’s film and escapes in a canoe, hiding in the forest until the others leave the island. She trashes everything in the cabin, and runs around naked, eating unwashed plants, and living outside. I found these quite disturbing scenes, and although the end of the novel suggests a return to some form of normality it was something of a relief. This will probably sound patronising, but this felt like an early sketch for a novel – lots of themes and ideas are laid out for consideration, but the narrative was erratic and very difficult to engage with. There’s little here to suggest the impressive prose and strong ideas that Atwood was to develop in her later work.