To build suspense and create a narrative hall of mirrors, Ms. Atwood deftly cuts back and forth among three plot lines.
These lines actually appear in the Kirkus review: "Containing elements of the 007 and Jason Bourne sagas, Graham Greene's insular spy novels, William Gibson's cyber thrillers, TV's Burn Notice and Mad magazine's classic Spy vs. Spy comic strip, this book is a narrative hall of mirrors in which nothing and no one are as they seem and emotion is a perilous thing to have".
That comparison of Flaubert and Chekhov -- to say nothing of his dismissal of allegory, of magic realism, and the kind of postmodern narrative halls-of-mirrors you find in DeLillo and his followers -- reminds you that a consideration almost wholly absent from his final judgments is that of aesthetic pleasure, of playfulness, of fun.
But while that part of the family history may have been mentioned to visitors, it was certainly not the main narrative of Rock Hall in its early decades as a museum.
Although the plot moves in a predictable direction when it turns out that the developer has connections to City Hall, the narrative goes beyond back-room politics in its argument that dishonesty in the building trade is a crime against the soul of the city.
I wouldn't want making art to turn on the depth of one's grief, or marriage to turn on artistic collaboration; the Hall-Kenyon narrative keeps the terms of reality just slightly too tidy and palatable, however sublimely harrowing its nuts and bolts.
As the story corkscrews from a straightforward narrative into a garish Freudian hall of mirrors in which reality and fantasy, mothers and whores become fatally confused, "Spider" metamorphoses into a high-toned horror film that suggests a British "American Psycho," infused with a Pinteresque ambiguity and menace.
In the hall-of-mirrors narrative of "Pale Fire," an increasingly insane editor comments in increasingly eccentric terms about the posthumous poem of a recently deceased fictional American poet.
The climate change narrative was not within the halls of bureaucracy, it was on the ground with the people, by the people.
The program's components are treated as spatial episodes in an overall narrative structure, much like the meeting halls in Vladimir Tatlin's 1920 proposed Monument to the Third Communist International.
As in the other two plays, the women keep a close watch, their power-behind-the-throne manipulations helping turn a hall of mirrors into a compelling narrative.
