Books & Poetry

Margaret Atwood’s recent short-story collection, ‘The Tent’, was a series of oneiric meditations on the imaginative process, but this latest appears to be a deliberate counterpoint, the reality-rooted flipside to all that myth and fancy. You don’t have to be an Atwood anorak to recognise the autobiographical streak in these ravishingly limpid, interlocking tales; a photo of a white horse standing outside a barn provides an irresistible invitation to believe at least one part of the narrative to be based in fact – the one that sees a scandalously unmarried couple, Tig and Nell, retreat to the country to live Tig’s hippy dream. But of course, this is not a memoir; it’s more like a reckoning – a moral cashing-up at the close of business.

In the story named after ‘The White Horse’, and the one that precedes it, ‘Monopoly’, Nell is quietly panicking about the bucolic role-play that has been foisted upon her, and with the chasm that appears to be opening up between what she is and what she is supposed to be. Identity and appearance are the warp and weft of these stories, and the pattern that emerges is of the seminal Atwoodian themes: female self-determination, storytelling and survival.

None of these three things is easy, especially when trouble pounces, as it does, at every opportunity – the book begins with ‘The Bad News’ and its constant presence in human history, then follows Nell from her earliest setback (the birth of an unwanted sister) through school, maturity and on into old age, both her parents’ and her own.

Even the dead are unquiet – in ‘The Entities’ they haunt Tig’s dead ex-wife’s house (they ‘had real estate preferences’) and have to be exorcised. It’s in this story that Nell gets closest to an answer to all this shifting about: when she turns the ghosts into a colourful anecdote, they can finally be laid to rest. ‘In the end we’ll all become stories,’ says Nell. ‘Or else we’ll become entities. Maybe it’s the same.’

These stories are full of beautiful and simple insights like that, and of sly humour too. Classic Atwood.