The questions dated, the answers fresh

Curious Pursuits is a collection of the ‘occasional writing’ of Margaret Atwood — essays, reviews, talks and introductions to books. Such rehashes often remind one of Juvenal’s adage that ‘twice-cooked cabbage is death’: it was, indeed, only as a fan of Margaret Atwood’s that I wanted to review this book at all, since it would give an excuse to write about her novels.

It turns out, however, to be hugely enjoyable in its own right. Curious Pursuits reminds one that Atwood is a superbly funny (as well as serious) writer: her wit is winningly relaxed and genial as well as sharp.

It is odd how often her humour is dis- regarded, particularly when she is routinely read in relation to the Women’s Movement. At the end of the Eighties, I found myself — after incautiously admitting in an examiners’ meeting that I had read all of her novels to date — marking batches of Tripos theses on Atwood. You would never have guessed, from those earnest indictments of patriarchy, that a joke ever flowed from her pen. But then humour notoriously eludes academic analysis, particularly of the type that needs to refer to Lacan’s concept of the phallus (then de rigueur, as the actress said to the bishop).

Margaret Atwood is a child of her times, of course; so there are plenty of women’s issues in her fiction, if that is what you are after. As she writes,

the novel has its roots in mud, and part of the mud is history, and part of the history we’ve had recently is the history of the women’s movement.

But she is a fine novelist precisely because she does not write about issues as such. As she says in this book, her subject is ‘individual characters interacting with and acted upon by the world that surrounds them’. It is ‘details’ that fire her imagination; in fiction, ‘larger patterns’ emerge, almost accidentally and in retrospect.

In these articles and lectures, ranging in date from 1970 to the present, however, Atwood is often addressing the concerns of the times — particularly, in the earlier pieces, feminism. Sometimes, the attitudes and beliefs she is reacting to seem very much of their era; but her reactions are still fresh.

She picks up on the often-repeated belief, given curious importance in the Eighties, that

once all werewolves were male, and female vampires were usually mere sidekicks; but there are now female werewolves, and women are moving in on the star bloodsucking roles as well…

I remember that one, and it annoyed me at the time, because it is untrue. It is almost easier to think of early female vampires. Carmilla, Sheridan Le Fanu’s luscious and explicitly lesbian vampire, predates Dracula; Br