Dedicated to her late partner, these reflections on marriage, mortality and many-tentacled aliens show Atwood’s mastery of the short form
’s latest book are old, or heading that way, and their stories unwrap what TS Eliot called the gifts reserved for age. There are chips and fragments of lives, full of sass and sadness. The book is in three parts: a miscellaneous collection of stories is sandwiched between sections called Tig and Nell and Nell and Tig. The Nell and Tig stories tell the tale of a long and loving marriage, and what comes after.
Many of these stories dwell wanly on how love flourishes, as time goes on, amid the most crosspatch and cussed of human interactions. Two Scorched Men describes friends of Nell and Tig, both dead by the time the story is being narrated: a “short, roundish, genial Frenchman” and a “lanky, explosive Irishman” who says of Atwood’s home city Toronto: “Stuff Toronto, timid prudish provincial mud puddle.
Atwood is a literary writer who entirely sees the point of science fiction, and her speculative instincts are on show in several of the stories here. The cheery jeu d’esprit Impatient Griselda, for instance, is a monologue by a many-tentacled alien creature, employed by the entertainment department of an “intergalactic crises aid-package”, telling a collection of quarantined humans a fairy story.
Another post-apocalyptic story touches on Handmaid’s Tale territory: a virus that makes Covid look like a runny nose has roared through humanity, and the uninfected are made to breed through arranged marriages while, confined to lawless “Freeforalls”, the rest of the population gets on with living and loving and dying. And in Metempsychosis there’s a delightful description of a snail’s dismay as it finds its soul transferred into the body of a human being.
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