Moral Disorder Margaret Atwood Bloomsbury, 257pp, £15.99 ISBN 0747581622
Nell, the slippery protagonist of Margaret Atwood’s latest collection of short stories, is a familiar Atwoodian creation: she lives "like a sort of transparent balloon, drifting over the world without making much contact with it". We follow her from introspective childhood, through a series of failed relationships ("trapped, stagnant, limp-bristled companionship"), to an uneasy marriage and a dilapidated farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. The spaces between the stories speak as loudly as the stories themselves, just as unspoken words between characters seethe with insistence.
Atwood’s world is uncontrollable, threatening: farm animals clamour to escape; ghosts (or "entities") linger in dark corners; families crumble and, always, loneliness loiters somewhere at the edge. Nevertheless, this is one of her funniest works, often (surprisingly) when the subject matter is at its darkest.
Atwood swirls her finger in many themes: the treachery of the countryside and the indifference of the city, the inevitable dusty drift into old age and, most poignantly, the unfinished stories that define us all. Like Nell, Atwood suggests, we all occupy "the small window between . . . past tense, back then; future tense, not yet". A chilling, and tantalising, conclusion.
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