PEARL K. BELL
89
She will unearth the evil truth no matter how terrible the consequences.
As the ship sails from Copenhagen toward the icy caverns off
Greenland, Hoeg's story begins to slip ineluctably out of the more or less
rational confines of a thriller into the exploitative fantasies of science fic–
tion, complete with mad scientists hunting for supposedly extinct para–
sites, long preserved in the glacial eternity (along the lines of
jurrasic Park).
But Hoeg also struggles to ballast his wild abundance of ingenious
imaginings with the sober fruits of his voluminous research, and provides
us with a dizzying lode of information about glaciers, different kinds of
ice, maritime law, cooking, meteorites and asteroids, and a great deal
more. It would all become intolerable, for it is certainly more than most
of us would ever want to know, were it not for Hoeg's stylistic virtuosity,
his prose by turns seductively lyrical, hallucinatory, uncanny in its
descriptive magic.
Unfortunately, as the rich stew of mayhem, madness and fantasy
comes to a boil in the final third of the novel, the mettlesome heroine we
encountered at the start slowly fades away, even as she is being shot at,
bludgeoned with marlinspikes, turning black and blue
all
over. The ar–
resting intensity, the sardonic eccentricity that made Smilla so appealing is
overwhelmed by the violent requirements of a "riveting" sci-fi plot. And
the end of the story is so murky and impenetrable, so contrivedly opaque
and unfathomable, that we long with poignant regret for the opinionated,
uncompromising, straight-talking Smilla who beguiled us from the start
with her boldly original fix on the world. But she is nowhere to be
found. And we are lost in the glacial silence.
It
is hard to understand why feminists regard the Canadian novelist
Margaret Atwood as one of their brightest stars. Particularly in her recent
novels (including that heavy-handed dystopia
The Handmaid's Tale),
her
female characters tend to be either sorry, soft-hearted nonentities, or
maleficent bitches, with scarcely any figures of redeeming plausibility
between these extremes. By now it's quite clear that Atwood doesn't have
much use for women - at least, not for the sort of women who believe in
love and loyalty, in goodness and friendship and generosity.
Nice
women.
What bestirs Atwood's keenest interest and fervently engages her consid–
erable wit and passion is female wickedness, the nastier the better.
Atwood has tried to claim in recent interviews that the sort of mad, bad,
and dangerous women she's so fond of depicting are signs of a new kind
of late-twentieth-century feminism which no longer regards men as the
sole embodiments of evil. Women, too, can - should? - be cruel and
destructive and more power to them, since, as Atwood remarked in an
interview, "Women are tired ofbeing good
all
the time." Gender equal-
