Margaret Atwood is in the first rank of literary fame and her trophy cabinet is handsomely stocked; yet she has never fully shaken off the suspicion that her politics have spoiled her writing. Despite the practised prose, delicate observation and steady-handed drip-feed of plot, there sometimes rises off the page a teacherly spirit that grabs you by the lapels and says, ‘Now listen here’. Gender relations, climate change; Atwood would probably say these subjects are more important than whether the direction of a book isn’t just a bit too obvious. And maybe she’s right.
But it bodes well for the reader that in Stone Mattress, her new collection of ‘tales’, she gravitates towards a more personal subject. In most of them, people in their seventies or thereabouts (like Atwood), often literary figures, are again confronted with the one vexed question of their youth.
For the characters in the best three tales, which together form a kind of short novel about 100 pages long, that question is a 50-year-old affair. Wispy, potty old Constance Starr is a commercially successful authoress of fantasy fiction who, in her youth, was derided (as Atwood has sometimes been) for writing ‘genre’. This derision came from the highbrow friends of her true love, a self-involved poet whom she came home to find in a passionate clinch with Marjorie, a volunteer bookkeeper with a braying laugh.
For the next five decades, Constance keeps a special hell for Marjorie in her literary fantasy world: every day at noon, Marjorie is stung by 100 emerald and indigo bees. For her part, Marjorie was soon ditched by the poet and has feared Constance ever since. When they are brought together, it’s giving nothing away to say that Constance does not come out fighting.
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