Writer’s block is clearly not an issue that affects Margaret Atwood. Stone Mattress , an anthology of nine unusual tales, is her 55th book. That this award-winning Canadian author’s prolific output and commercial success have not eroded the critical acclaim she continues to enjoy reveals a hard-to-rival balancing act, which could be daunting for those approaching her work as virgin territory.
Exploring her oddly disorienting world in this collection of short fiction, the neophyte may try and clutch at recognisable landmarks: fleeting impressions of Roald Dahl, for instance, whose taste for the macabre Atwood can match with ease; traces, perhaps, of Kingsley Amis, whose cynicism appears to surface in the depiction of her own characters — few of them innocent victims and many eventually hoisted by their own petard; and elements of John Cheever in her frighteningly acute insight into human relationships. Yet her stories remain distinctively her own.
The reasons are not hard to find: consider her unique brand of cynicism, leavened by a lightness of touch that lends an irreverent twist to the most sombre of moments; or her inimitable flair for the absurd, that often prompts an unexpected fit of the giggles in gloom-and-doom situations, leaving us uncertain, in retrospect, about its appropriateness in a given context. A prime example is ‘I Dream of Zenia with the Bright Red Teeth’, where Atwood’s quirky humour lends a different flavour to the bitterness of three women convinced that the spirit of their fourth friend, the deceased Zenia who had stolen a man from each of them years back, has been reincarnated in a pet dog.
Atwood’s sly transports of fantasy in grittily real settings invariably leave us unsure as to how we should interpret a story’s mood and developments. In her world, anything is possible. In ‘Alphinland’, the first of a trilogy of tales involving the same trio of principal characters, a widowed fantasy writer imagines herself communing with her dead husband. In the closing story, ‘Torching the Dusties’, Wilma, the near- blind inmate of a high-end old-age home, constantly sees “the little people” — apparitions that “aren’t real”, but the symptoms of Charles Bonnet’s syndrome from which she suffers. And the tragi-comic slant to ‘The Freeze-Dried Groom’ subverts our anticipated response to the tribulations of a philandering antiques dealer who discovers, among the wedding paraphernalia stocked in an abandoned storage unit, the bridegroom himself — dead and “dried out like a mummy”. The man encounters the killer bride quite by chance and blackmails her into a tryst. At which point, the story ends on a dead-serious note — pun intended.
Death — natural or planned — is a perennial presence in Atwood’s world. Rightly so, if you consider that her stories primarily involve elderly protagonists — several bent on revenge. Even the title story, which comes closest to our conventional perception of reality, features an aging physiotherapist. Verna, who has made a vocation out of marrying wealthy patients/clients and hastening their deaths, is impelled by the need to avenge the gross injustice she had suffered as a naive 14-year-old date-rape victim. She eventually meets her unsuspecting rapist on an Arctic cruise and prepares to kill him, but whether or not she succeeds is less important than the way the author draws us into Verna’s “stunted, twisted, mangled” mindscape.
It is in this story (and in ‘Lusus Naturae’, where a young girl with a hideous congenital deformity is forced by her parents to fake her own death) that we discover another Atwood, the one who can set aside her almost cold detached-observer stance for a moment and share deep empathy with the vulnerable. Unsurprisingly, it is here, too, that her persona as a poet comes to the fore. Consider, for instance, her description of the Arctic sky: “…a flight of lenticular clouds hovering…like spaceships.”
“Writing has to do with darkness and…a compulsion to enter it,” the author declares in Negotiating with the Dead . And Stone Mattress seems to bear her out. But it is her desire to “illuminate” that darkness and “bring something back out to the light” that lends Atwood’s work that extra dimension and makes her the writer she is today.
Stone Mattress;Margaret Atwood; Bloomsbury; Rs 599
