Hot on the heels of The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood’s retelling of the story of Penelope and Odysseus, comes The Tent, a neat, must-have little volume with scarlet endpapers, a silky marker and Atwood’s own illustrations — devilish red dogs and Egyptian-looking ladies. And inside The Tent? A splendid mix of tales, retellings of myths, fables and fairy stories, a couple of poems and what the blurb describes as ‘fictional essays’.
Come inside. Meet Philomela retelling Ovid’s horror story of bigamy and her metamorphosis into a nightingale, Salome wooing the religious studies teacher (they both lose their heads) and Horatio trying to obey Hamlet’s request to tell his story only to find that ‘some jumped-up English playwright’ has dramatised the ‘whole fracas’. Atwood likes playing about with Hamlet. In Good Bones she gave us Gertrude’s version of the story (improving Claudius’s image and casting doubt on who really killed Hamlet’s dad).
There’s a sharp moral or comment tucked in with the wit of these fables. ‘Chicken Little Goes Too Far’, for example, could be a homily on global warming. Remember this chick? The one running around saying the sky was about to fall? A whistle-blower if ever there was. (The Little Red Hen had a happier end in Good Bones.)
Atwood could act as a kind of metaphysical agony aunt. Do you wonder what questions St Peter might ask should you reach the heavenly gates? It could be ‘Did you love your cat?’ or ‘What’s your favourite colour?’ (‘Gateway’). And should you have a friend lost, like Dante, in the middle of a dark wood, it’s as well to remember he might not want to be rescued (‘The Impenetrable Forest’). At a more hum-drum level, next time you’re in what-to-wear mode (i.e.
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