Margaret Atwood’s Bodily Harm is a gripping, darkly comic novel that intertwines political turmoil with personal crisis. The story follows Rennie Wilford, a young Canadian journalist specializing in lightweight lifestyle articles, who escapes to the fictional Caribbean island of St. Antoine after a mastectomy and a failed relationship. What begins as a recuperative retreat quickly spirals into a dangerous entanglement with the island’s violent colonial politics.
As Rennie befriends Lora, a brash American expat with dubious connections, she becomes an unwilling witness to corruption, rebellion, and imprisonment. Atwood masterfully contrasts Rennie’s privileged detachment with the brutal realities of postcolonial power struggles, forcing her to confront her own complicity and vulnerability. The novel’s tension escalates to a harrowing climax where political and bodily violations mirror each other.
With razor-sharp prose, Atwood explores themes of agency, survival, and the commodification of suffering, crafting a story that is as much about the politics of the body as the body politic. A lesser-known but potent work in her oeuvre, Bodily Harm reveals Atwood’s early mastery of merging the personal with the geopolitical.
