Novel: Bodily Harm

Premise and setting
Bodily Harm follows Rennie, a Canadian travel writer who leaves her life in North America to convalesce on a Caribbean island after a violently ended affair. The island is lush, hot, and alluring but edged with political tension; its beauty masks checkpoints, disappearances, and an uneasy occupation by security forces. The novel juxtaposes the intimate, internal world of a woman recovering from personal violence with the external, public violence of a society teetering toward repression.
Rennie's island refuge is neither safe nor restorative in any simple sense. The landscape and climate are rendered with sensory detail that intensifies the novel's sense of unease: humidity, heat, food, and the body itself are repeatedly foregrounded as sites of pleasure and threat.

Main characters and narrative arc
Rennie is at once observant and bruised, a professional storyteller whose travelogues have made a career out of other people's places. On the island she becomes involved with local residents, expatriates, and a man whose politics and private loyalties drag her into a conflict she did not anticipate. As she tries to rebuild a sense of herself after emotional and physical battering, the island's political fractures pull her into risky proximity with underground activists and state violence.
The narrative tracks Rennie's attempts to navigate desire, fear, and her ambivalent role as outsider, witness, and occasional participant. Encounters that might have remained contained, an affair, a friendship, a brief intimacy, acquire larger significance as they intersect with the island's police presence, rumoured torture, and the ways bodies are controlled and violated in both personal and political spheres.

Themes and motifs
Bodily Harm interrogates how violence, whether intimate or institutional, shapes identity and politics. It probes the hard-to-draw line between personal trauma and collective brutality, arguing that the body is both battleground and testimony. Atwood examines gendered power through scenes that show how sexual and physical domination mirror, on a smaller scale, state repression and colonial legacies.
Travel writing and narrative authority are recurring motifs: Rennie's craft, describing places and people, becomes a lens for considering who gets to tell whose story and how representations can exoticize, exploit, or inadvertently endanger. Food, weather, medical settings, and the visceral language of pain recur as metaphors and concrete experiences, reinforcing the novel's preoccupation with the senses as sites of knowledge and vulnerability.

Style and tone
The prose is spare, often mordant, and attentive to detail, balancing dry wit with moments of stark emotional intensity. The island's sensuality is rendered without romanticization; Atwood uses atmospheric description to heighten a sense of threat rather than idyll. Rennie's voice, weary and sardonic at times, allows empathy without sentimentality, conveying the difficulty of disentangling longing from self-preservation.
Bodily Harm blends political thriller elements with psychological realism, producing a work that reads as both a suspenseful critique of authoritarianism and a patient exploration of healing. Its ending resists tidy resolution, leaving readers with an ambivalent sense of survival, accountability, and the lingering effects of trauma.

Legacy and resonance
The novel foregrounds questions that remain urgent: how the body bears traces of power and violence, how personal histories entwine with political movements, and what recovery can mean when danger is structural rather than isolated. Its combination of social critique and intimate narrative continues to speak to readers interested in feminism, postcolonial politics, and the ethics of storytelling.