Cat's Eye
by Margaret Atwood
Summary
Elaine Risley, a painter returning to Toronto for a retrospective of her own work, spends the novel moving between the present exhibition and her childhood memories of the same city during and after the Second World War. At eight years old, newly settled after years of nomadic travel with her entomologist father, Elaine falls in with a trio of girls, Carol, Grace, and, most consequentially, Cordelia, whose friendship curdles almost immediately into a sustained, deliberate campaign of psychological cruelty disguised as helping Elaine improve herself, culminating in an incident where the girls abandon her, freezing, at the bottom of a ravine after taking her hat. A vision of the Virgin Mary in the ravine that day marks a turning point, and Elaine slowly finds the will to break away from Cordelia's control, so that by adolescence the power between them has reversed entirely, with Elaine growing sharper and more self possessed while Cordelia, increasingly unstable, falls behind academically and emotionally. The two drift apart and briefly reconnect as adults, and years later Elaine learns that Cordelia has been hospitalized and writes asking Elaine to help her escape; Elaine refuses, and a returned, unopened letter is the last contact between them, leaving Elaine unsure for the rest of her life whether Cordelia is alive. The novel closes with Elaine, at her own retrospective, finding a childhood keepsake, a marbled glass cat's eye, that returns her fully to the memories the whole book has been circling, offering her something closer to understanding than to any conventional resolution with Cordelia herself.
Atwood writes Elaine's dual timeline in close, exact, often devastating detail, treating a child's cruelty toward another child with the same seriousness most novels reserve for adult betrayal, and the book reads slowly in its childhood sections and faster once adult Elaine's art and marriages take over, its central argument being that friendship between girls can wound as permanently as anything that follows it in adult life.
Historical Context & Significance
McClelland and Stewart published Cat's Eye in September 1988, and it was shortlisted that year for Canada's Governor General's Award for fiction and, the following year, for the Booker Prize, a prize Atwood would not actually win until 2000 for The Blind Assassin and again, jointly, in 2019 for The Testaments, so Cat's Eye itself remained a finalist rather than a winner on both occasions. Atwood has said she began a version of the novel as early as 1964 and set it aside for more than two decades before finishing it, partly, she later admitted, because the real person behind Cordelia was still alive.
The novel is now read as one of Atwood's most explicitly autobiographical books and a defining account of childhood bullying among girls, its reputation growing steadily in the decades since its double near miss with Canada's and Britain's two most prominent literary prizes.