Life Before Man

This is a strange passage to find in a novel that is generally regarded as Atwood’s most depressingly realist fiction.2 Clearly it belongs to another genre altogether, that of science fiction fantasy, for the dinosaur that pushes into the Toronto coffee house on Saturday, 30 October 1976, summoned up by a young woman’s imagination, is one of those contingent presences which interrupt the discourses of everyday life and threaten to collapse the conventions of realism. Of course this is Lesje’s fantasy, which at some level relates to her sense of otherness, coded into the racial slurs of ‘William Wasp’ and ‘Lesje Litvak’ in this first Atwood novel to signal Toronto’s multiculturalism. Yet the appearance of this monster with its ravenous desires intruding into the modern world from the margins of prehistory introduces a principle of radical discontinuity into this novel. Not only is Life Before Man a multivoiced text told from the different perspectives of the three main characters (of whom Lesje is one), but within this structure there is a wide range of individual gestures of resistance and survival, which fracture its social surfaces. We may well ask what kind of story Atwood is telling us, in a novel that looks backward to prehistory and forward to the future.