At times playful, at times shattering
Margaret Atwood’s new collection includes some of the best short fiction she’s ever written
Margaret Atwood’s latest collection of short stories, her first since 2014’s “Stone Mattress,” suffers from a case of split personality.
It’s broken into three sections, the first and third containing linked stories that focus on a couple, Tig and Nell, before and after Tig’s death. The middle section, “My Evil Mother,” comprises a group of disparate tales that traffic in a more genre-oriented mode.
In its construction, “Old Babes in the Wood” emblematizes the two poles of Atwood’s sensibility: the realist and the fabulist. The stories of Tig and Nell are cast in the former mode, reflecting the Atwood of “Cat’s Eye,” “Life Before Man” and other works of their ilk. The middle stories are more closely affiliated with the later-period Atwood’s drift into speculative fiction, not so much the barbed satire of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” but the more earnest attempts at traversing genre territory found in the MaddAddam trilogy and “The Heart Goes Last.”
She’s done this before, of course: the 2000 Booker Prize-winning novel “The Blind Assassin” combined realism and speculative fiction, though there it was done in the context of a fiction-within-a-fiction. Here, the two modes are kept more or less discrete.
More or less, because there are stories in the central part of “Old Babes in the Wood” that retreat into a kind of naturalism. “Bad Teeth,” about a woman, Csilla, trying to pry details of a supposed affair out of her friend, Lynne, eschews genre trappings, though it is not entirely unconnected to the stories that surround it.
Those stories include “My Evil Mother,” an intergenerational tale about a family of witches; “Death by Clamshell,” an imagined monologue by Hypatia of Alexandria recalling, in graphic detail, her execution by flensing, dismemberment and immolation; and “The Dead Interview,” an imagined conversation between Atwood and the ghost of George Orwell, summoned up through a medium.
These tales find Atwood in an uncommonly playful mood, though the exuberance comes at a price. While a conversation between one of contemporary fiction’s most scathing social critics and one of the most iconic politically engaged writers of cautionary fiction from the previous century sounds like a match made in heaven, Atwood hedges her bets, refusing to push the correlations between “Nineteen-Eighty Four” and our current censorious climate as far as they could go.
“Metempsychosis,” about a snail that finds its soul transplanted into the body of a customer service representative at a bank, likewise fails to exploit its premise for much more than obvious jokes.
What unites “Bad Teeth,” “Airborne: A Symposium” (another realist tale) and the other stories in this section is their focus on storytelling. Each of the eight pieces in “My Evil Mother” addresses in some manner the way we tell stories, the motivation behind this practice, and the ways stories get passed down among individuals, generations and entire cultures. It’s a subject that has animated Atwood throughout her career, and it’s evident here that she is enjoying her flirtations with various modes and registers of narrative.
These stories also serve as a balm for the more serious tales about Tig and Nell, which focus exclusively — almost relentlessly — on the subject of death. Stories such as “Widows” and “Wooden Box” provide heartrending glimpses into the psyche of an aging woman struggling to come to terms with the emptiness her departed companion has bequeathed her. In an early story, “Morte de Smudgie,” a much younger Nell rewrites Tennyson’s classic poetic elegy in honour of her recently dead cat; this, it becomes apparent, is a comic debasement, a trial run for the much more charged death that is to follow.
While the excursions in “My Evil Mother” are uneven in their impact, the Tig and Nell stories rank with the best short fiction Atwood has produced.
The trio at the start, in which death is either a theoretical matter for the future or confined to the realm of beloved pets, seeds the ground for the emotionally shattering quartet that close the book. In “Wooden Box,” Nell discovers the titular object, carved by her late partner in high school shop class, while cleaning the cottage they shared together. “Why did you leave it behind like that? For me to find?” Nell asks the empty room. Tig’s imagined response is brutal in its brevity; heartbreaking in its finality. “It’s just a box,” he tells her. “We had a good run. You’ll be fine.”