Books: Out of the Woods

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If modern man is suffering the pain of turning into his own machine, the author argues in effect, why not let him choose the less ignominious old organic pain of being an animal? Much of this sounds modish and empty. But Margaret Atwood, alternately satirical and lyrical, is a mistress of controlled hysteria. She skillfully presses her polarized universe upon her reader and indeed upon her race. She may be excessively hard on civilization. But, as only a really gifted writer can, she turns paranoia into art, forcing her rapidly industrializing fellow countrymen — her rap idly overindustrializing world — to contemplate the hate in the bloody eye of one of their victims: the "pure pain, clear as water, an animal's at the moment the trap closes." ∙Melvin Maddocks