[In] Margaret Atwood's new novel, Bodily Harm,… readers of her previous comic novels will find much that is familiar. Here again is the opposition between a superficial world of social convention and a subsurface one of unconscious will, physiological need and barbaric impulse. Again the narrative pattern is that of Shakespearean comedy—alienation from natural order (Rennie's Toronto career), followed by descent into a more primitive but healing reality (cancer and Caribbean violence), and finally some reestablishment of order (the concluding insight). Rennie, the point-of-view character, is another of the self-preoccupied female participants in intellectual Toronto that one encounters in The Edible Woman, Surfacing and Lady Oracle; although carrying a different history, she has the same general vocabulary, ironic wit and speech patterns of the earlier characters….

Atwood has consistently used the human body as a metaphor for surface and depth; concern for the skin as in Anna's...