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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Margaret Atwood: In search of the perfect ending
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Margaret Atwood: In search of the perfect ending

Ageing, decay and death mark Margaret Atwood's new short stories

Margaret Atwood. Photo: Jean Malek/Nan A Talese/BloombergPremium
Margaret Atwood. Photo: Jean Malek/Nan A Talese/Bloomberg

Over 55 books across genres and forms, in a writing career spanning 40-odd years, Margaret Atwood has demonstrated her grasp over the art of the uncomfortable. With surgical precision, she slashes away at our facades, burrowing inside the subcutaneous layer of our selves where we stash away our unarticulated fears, hopes-against-hopes and darkest desires. In settings dystopian and historical, with creatures recognizably human and genetically modified, she has examined a wide range of concerns, from familial politics and feminism to procreational rights and the balance of power, unerringly zeroing in on the shadowland between the socially acceptable and the trangressional.

If Stone Mattress: Nine Tales can be considered a distillation of ideas from the Atwood canon—including prisms of various genres of fiction to view them through—the collection also has its own themes running through: of ageing, decay and death, all leavened with the author’s signature black humour and immense empathy for human limitations.

As always, her biggest ally to this end is her ability to adopt a completely convincing narrative voice and manipulate the reader’s sympathies almost artlessly. Be it the little old lady who hears her dead husband’s admonitions in her head (Alphinland, the first of three interconnected stories) or the lying, cheating man about to embark on his most daring flirtation yet (The Freeze-Dried Groom), Atwood has a way of insinuating herself into their heads and telling their stories so that their fallibility becomes evident gradually, even subversively.

And yet, it’s not as if Atwood falls back on the classic “twist" ending. Consider the title story, Stone Mattress, the literal translation of a stromatolite, created by ancient layers of fossilized algae. The rock performs the same function—in the title and otherwise—as the lamb in Roald Dahl’s acclaimed short story Lamb To The Slaughter, but the similarity ends there. Dahl’s story opens with a scene of domestic bliss: “The room was warm and clean, the curtains drawn, the two table lamps alight—hers and the one by the empty chair opposite... Mary Maloney was waiting for her husband to come back from work."

Stone Mattress—Nine Tales: Bloomsbury, 273 pages, 599.
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Stone Mattress—Nine Tales: Bloomsbury, 273 pages, 599.

In The Dead Hand Loves You, an updated spin on Gothic horror, for instance, ageing cult novelist Jack Dace tracks down three former housemates who have been nibbling away at his success for years. Does he intend to kill them? He’s not sure, but he wants resolution. It comes in the most unexpected way possible: “There. He’s taken the plunge, but the plunge into what? Jack, be nimble, he tells himself. Avoid traps... don’t make a mistake. But how much time does he have left in his life to worry about mistakes?"

The desperation of the elderly is not a subject that gets much space in the literature of our youth-obsessed societies, even as we apprehend getting old, losing a partner or our wealth or our senses. In the first set of three linked stories, there’s Constance, her former boyfriend Gavin, and Jorrie, with whom he had a fling, leading to his break-up with Constance. When two of these three meet, many years after life has taken them down very different paths, the dynamics, though, are still volatile, the denouement still up in the air.

All the vulnerabilities—of life, love, companionship, independence and dignity—are classically showcased in the last story, Torching The Dusties. Recalling Michael Dibdin’s satirical whodunnit The Dying Of The Light (1993) in its setting and macabre cruelty, the story begins with Wilma, settled into a routine at her assisted-care facility called Ambrosia Manor, looking forward to her breakfasts with housemate Tobias. She is afflicted with the Charles Bonnet Syndrome and, consequently, reading Gone With The Wind, even in extra-large type, is an ordeal, but her daughter has presented her with a radio, over which she learns about “Artern", a group picketing old-age homes worldwide, because they think it’s “Our Turn", that is, to enjoy the comforts that Wilma and Tobias continue to live in.

How will it end? Will the youth win? Can Wilma and Tobias make a getaway? If so, for how long? And to what end? There are no obvious answers but, in articulating the questions, Atwood gives voice to the anxieties of an age—and of ageing. Stone Mattress is the kind of book that makes you look around you for what you don’t see.

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Published: 08 Nov 2014, 12:14 AM IST
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