Horror stories, fantastical worlds and something very nasty in a storage unit: a sly take on the memories and myth-making of old age
Sharp and sly … Margaret Atwood. Photograph: Jules Annan/Barcroft Media
The nine stories in Margaret Atwood's new collection should, she explains in an afterword, properly be considered "tales": removed "from the realm of mundane works and days", evoking "the world of the folk tale, the wonder tale, and the long-ago teller of tales". Here are vampires, ghostly presences, disembodied hands; revenge, possession, and something very nasty vacuum-packed in an abandoned storage unit. There are also tales about tales – pulp horror, epic fantasy, love poetry – with nearly all the characters looking back from old age on a distant past that has become its own mythological landscape.
That distant past, in the three linked stories that open the collection, is boho Toronto in the early 60s, when hungry young poets wrote gems such as "My Lady's Ass is Nothing Like the Moon" and women queued up to minister to their genius and be written about. Constance Starr is an elderly muse-turned-author, whose swords-and-sorcery fantasy world Alphinland was mocked by the poets she outsold, but who has gained critical respectability now that academics study "the function of symbolism versus neo-representationalism in the process of world-building". Her first love, back when she was "young enough to find poverty glamorous", was womanising, self-aggrandising Gavin, whom we revisit as a sulky elder statesman of literature, cosseted by a younger third wife who berates him for his unreconstructed ways: "You can't talk to women like that anymore!" Gavin may be furiously sentimental about the past – watching a grainy video of a 60s poetry reading, he wants to weep – but nostalgia, Atwood suggests, is just another form of male privilege.More
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