What lies within

“You could not be a real writer and a Canadian too”, Margaret Atwood says in an essay, speaking of her early writing days. Ironically, it is Atwood who has made the world aware of Canadian writing, more so than Alice Munro, in spite of her Nobel Prize in Literature. Atwood has a formidable reputation; her literary output is astounding, the quality of her writing brilliant and her novels acclaimed through the world, four of her books having been short listed for the Booker. She was expected to get it for The Handmaid’s Tale , her dark futuristic picture of a post-feminism backlash, or the equally brilliant Cat’s Eye and Alias Grace . But she finally got it for The Blind Assassin (TBA). After TBA , Atwood moved into what she calls ‘speculative fiction’ with the MaddAddam trilogy.

Now we have these Nine Tales . Calling them tales, Atwood explains, removes the stories “at least slightly from the realm of mundane works and days”. But Atwood’s fiction has often had this quality. “All stories are about wolves,” a character says in TBA . Many of Atwood’s stories are about predators and victims, though who is the predator and who the victim often remains in doubt. Like the murderer Grace in Alias Grace .

This thread runs through these nine tales as well. The first three tales are linked through the characters, something that works very well in short fiction. (Trollope did it excellently in his Barsetshire novels.) The three stories are, in a way, about literary genres, literary trends, literary people, about the female reverence for the male writer and the male writer exploiting this to the full. Atwood is deliciously wickedly funny about the literary world and there’s much that sounds familiar — like, Constance, a writer of fantasy stories, achieving great success through her Alphinland series. The other characters are her dead husband who talks to her, an ex-lover, an egoistical poet who scorned Constance’s work, the woman who nudged Constance out of the poet’s life, the poet’s third wife and a young researcher, who the poet thinks is working on him, when she is actually working, to his chagrin, on Constance. ‘The Dead Hand Loves You’, also a ‘literary story’, is about a writer who becomes successful because, “pulp and genre had established a toehold… on the shores of writerly legitimacy”, something close to what is now happening in the literary world. ‘Stone Mattress’ is about a date-rape victim, who later turns serial murderer and who, decades later, meeting the man who had raped her, plans his murder. But somehow the deadliness of the revenge gets lost in the icy vastness of the Arctic where the story happens.

In fact, the macabre and fabulist elements notwithstanding, most of the tales seem to be about the man-woman relationship — or rather, Atwood’s take on it. Which is perhaps why none of the stories has a happy ending, except ‘I Dream of Zenia with the Bright Red Teeth’, in which there is a promise that the woman will finally get the right man. And just when you are wondering where has the magic gone, there is ‘Torching the Dusties’ set in an Assisted Living Home for the wealthy, which is attacked and finally burnt by mobs of young people, asking the old to ‘move over’. “That means die, I suppose,” says Wilma, the main character, who is going blind and sees strange, beautiful visions of little people. There is something frighteningly prophetic about this story, a pessimistic vision of the future of a world in which human longevity is rapidly increasing. It is a story of inevitability rather than one created to shock. But the story also gives an exquisitely detailed picture of old age, its helplessness, the façade of sprightliness and fears about the body — “it’s rusting, creaking vengeful, brute machinery”. In fact, most of the stories are about the old, about what the old do with their pasts, with their baggage of memories. Perhaps, as Atwood once said, speaking of why she has written more pages from a female character’s point of view than that of a male, “it is easier to throw your mind into a character who has a few things in common with you.”

In an essay on the writing of Alias Grace , Atwood says: “… stories are not about this or that slice of the past, or this or that political event, or this or that city or country… They are about human nature.” As these stories are. Calling them ‘tales’ makes no difference to the reader who will read them as she reads all else. For the fairy tale, or the supernatural, or the Gothic element cannot make these stories anything but what they are — stories about people and therefore telling us something about us, even if it is the darkness within us.

(Shashi Deshpande is an author and critic)