I had forgotten what a good writer Margaret Atwood is. It happens sometimes, this amnesia about certain writers. I used to inhale her books. But then, at some point, I felt sated. No matter how many prizes she won, or accolades rained down, I wasn’t tempted. But then I found myself reviewing Stone Mattress, her new collection of short stories, and marvelling at her sheer craft.
She doesn’t call them anything as dull as “stories” of course. Instead she calls them “tales”, as in fairy, I guess, of which there may be one or two in this collection.
Stories, she explains at the end of the book, are linked to real life, or at least to social realism. Not so tales. “The Ancient Mariner tells a tale,” she notes. And so does she. “Several of these tales are tales about tales,” she says. I have to say that she has indulged the fabulist in her. Hers is a diorama populated by elves, vampires, groom murderers and psychopaths. There is even a black widow killer.
I hope you don’t, looking at that list, think this is a bit of a downer. For Atwood embraces these people, strokes them, understands them. She is a wicked woman with a wicked sense of humour. She has a weakness for a bit of a shocker, revenge served cold by women of a certain age with names such as Verna, and it is impossible not to be intrigued.
I loved it but with qualifications. The first three tales revolve in one way or another around a woman named Constance who is the creator of a place called Alphinland involving lots of creatures with truly fantastical names (the Scarlet Sorceress of Ruptous; I say no more). The first story, about Constance struggling in bereavement, admiring of her late husband even as she fretted over his faithfulness, gripped me. So imagine my thrill when the second tale and then the third revolved around other characters from this story. Was she playing with the form? So much fiction these days features different points of view, loosely strung together, like old Christmas chains. Would all nine tales be interlinked?
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But no. They are not. Still, the first three amount to 107 pages, a triptych tale — though there is no real word that I am aware of for a novella of three tales. I am pleased about this because I can tell you it is irritating when it ends too soon, after tempting you like ice cream in a dream you can never eat.
I approached the rest of the collection with just a bit of baggage. They were not, after all, about Alphinland. Or Constance. Or Scarlet Sorceresses! That is not to say they are not very good, except for one that I took a dislike to, possibly because it involves characters from a previous novel.
One of the tales is quite brilliant if almost a bit of a show-off. It is the eponymous Stone Mattress, a term which refers to a type of rock formation that is merely 1.9 billion years old. But, again, as I read it, I yearned for more. I could read a novel called The Stone Mattress. I could read another one called Alphinland. But instead I read this, tales too good to be this short.
Stone Mattress: Nine Tales by Margaret Atwood, Bloomsbury , 288pp, £18.99; ebook £16.99. To buy this book for £15.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134