MORAL DISORDER
by Margaret Atwood
Bloomsbury, £15.99; 272pp
MARGARET ATWOOD has long been fascinated by the relationship between photographs and memories. She often uses photographs in her poems to explore identity, in particular, the façades women adopt to succeed in society.
In Moral Disorder, her first collection of stories since Wilderness Tips, Atwood entices us to flip through the photo album of a Canadian woman who closely resembles herself.
Come here, sit beside me, she seems to say. Then she takes us on an emotional journey through loneliness, love, loss and old age, as experienced by a woman called Nell. She evokes Nell’s life in Canadian cities, suburbs and backwoods, from postwar to the present, from one captured moment to another.
In the opening piece, set in the present, Nell and her husband Tig face a mundane morning in their mature marriage with a “nebulous dread” of the future. Their world, threatened by political and environmental disasters, is unsafe and uncertain.
As elsewhere, Atwood’s characters are evading time, or realising that it is evading them. “These are the tenses that define us now,” Nell says. “The past tense, back then; future tense, not yet. We live in a small window between them, the space we’ve only recently come to think of as still.”
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The Art of Cooking and Serving harks back to the early 1950s, when Nell is 11. She is knitting a layette for the arrival of a sibling, and anticipating the effect that this new life will have on her family. Once her sister Lizzie is born, Nell becomes her carer, because her mother is unwell, her father is tramping in the forest and her elder brother away at camp. The story unfolds in a place where Atwood spent parts of her childhood: a cabin in Quebec, where her father undertook research as an entomologist.
Nell not only looks after the baby, she also teaches herself about gardening, cooking and manners — all the things she is expected to know as a responsible woman. Yet she dreams of going to dances, skating rinks and drive-ins. Eventually she asserts her independence, but years later suffers from guilt as Lizzie battles with painful depression in adolescence and adulthood.
In My Last Duchess, Nell is in Grade 12, studying English literature with Miss Bessie, who has elegant suits and “expertly waved” hair (not accidentally, she shares her name with the teacher who encouraged Atwood to write). Nell’s boyfriend Bill has sought her help with an exam on the Browning poem of the title.
As she explains things to Bill, Nell discovers things of her own — not only the meanings of “verisimilitude”, “meticulously” and “garrotted”, but also “love, alone, sad, over”. At the close of this poignant story, Nell sees an image of Miss Bessie “distant but very clear, like a photograph”, inviting her to enter a dark tunnel representing everything she is supposed to learn. It leads somewhere undetermined: The Other Place.
Nell, now in her twenties, works as a teacher in one town after another, hopping from one relationship to the next. This transient existence makes her wonder whether she will become a pimple-bummed intellectual or get married and have frilly curtains. “What if it’s not in the past, this other place? What if it’s still in the future? After all?” By the time we reach Monopoly, Nell has settled into a “medium-sized niche” as a book editor. She is in love with Tig, her friend Oona’s husband, and has run off with him to a small rural community in Ontario. There they tame the land and live quietly among their vegetables and chickens, alienated from society.
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This piece, along with the two that follow, Moral Disorder and The White Horse, are the most clear-eyed, bringing to the fore Atwood’s sensitivity to human nature and the natural world. The resistant landscape, with its equally resistant animals, is not just a backdrop but a force that spurs Nell on to survival. It also becomes a metaphor for the divisions within her character — the rational versus the irrational — as she confronts the role of second wife and stepmother to Tig’s children who visit at weekends.
Autobiographical or not, the book has a photograph of the farm taken by Atwood’s husband, Graeme Gibson, clearly the inspiration for Tig.
The final stories circle back to the themes of ageing and death, as Nell visits her elderly parents and unearths their legacy of photographs and memories. The impossibility of resolution is essential to the drama — as it often is with Atwood. This snapshot collection is a study of memory, to be cherished not just as an acute portrayal of family life, with all its possibilities and failings, but for revealing a little more of Atwood’s own struggle.