Book Review | Vintage Atwood in 7 elegant sketches of family, loss!

The appearance of a new Margaret Atwood book is now a global publishing phenomenon. And why not? Atwood, who has won the Booker Prize twice, has been called “arguably the most famous living literary novelist in the world” by the Guardian. The Daily Telegraph has said “there is no greater living writer”. The New York Times Book Review has hailed her as “a living legend”. She has not, like her fellow Canadian, Alice Munro, yet won the Nobel Prize for literature. But no one would be surprised if she did.

The Handmaid’s Tale is her most famous novel. And after it was made into a television series and turned into a kind of cultural touchstone, Atwood became a household name even in households that didn’t do that much reading.

Old Babes in the Wood, her new collection of stories, is vintage Atwood. It is witty, sharp, luminously intelligent, and preoccupied with big themes. Atwood is a big game hunter, and this book shows that, at the age of 83, her powers are undimmed.

‘My Evil Mother’ is a fascinating study of filial relations, acutely funny, and immensely perceptive. There is a hilarious piece, ‘The Dead Interview’, couched as an interview of the dead George Orwell by Atwood. The collection is illuminated by Atwood’s characteristic, memorable, throwaway asides. “I used to believe that having a good memory was a blessing, but I’m no longer so sure. Maybe forgetting is the blessing.” Atwood can change registers in a heartbeat, going from acerbic to profound to elusive to allusive. It is one of the great pleasures of reading her.

Old Babes in the Wood is at its shimmering best in a set of linked stories about a couple, Nell and Tig. They bookend the collection, which is clever, because the book begins and ends with its strongest pieces. Narrated with immense poise, elegance and restraint, these seven stories are  about the quotidian things in the life of a couple, the simple, everyday things that two people who have lived together for many years go through, the narrative they create of themselves by coexisting.

The darkness creeps in, and then envelopes the stories, as Tig, the husband, grows sick and begins to waste away, embarking on his journey to death. It echoes Philp Roth’s famous line: “Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.” And what then happens to the person left behind? “Have I gone into the dark tunnel, dressed in mourning black with gloves and a veil, and come out the other end, all cheery and wearing bright colours and loaded for bear? No. Because it is not a tunnel. There isn’t any other end. Time has ceased to be linear, with life events and memories in a chronological row, like beads on a string. It’s the strangest feeling, or experience, or rearrangement.”

Towards the end of these linked stories, Atwood presents a swelling, heartrending tableau of mourning, grief, memory, and loss. It is a classic example of locating the universal in the particular. Anyone who has grieved for a loved one would be able to see themselves in it.

If you happen to be a longstanding admirer of Atwood’s work, this is an unmissable collection. If you are new to her, this is the perfect entry point to her rich, diverse, and vast body of work.

Soumya Bhattacharya is the author of six acclaimed books of fiction, non-fiction, and memoir, the latest being the novel, Thirteen Kinds of Love.

Old Babes in the Wood: Stories

By Margaret Atwood

Penguin Random House

pp. 257, Rs.699