The Tent
by Margaret Atwood
(Bloomsbury)
This enigmatic book is a collection of oblique, even bizarre, essays — some of them barely three-quarters of a page long. Despite their colloquial and sisterly tone, which makes them seem easy reading, their meaning is not always immediately apparent. Some of them are baffling, but they exert a sort of pull that leaves one pondering.
The title of the collection comes from a piece of the same name. In it Margaret Atwood describes being in a tent in a hostile world. She begins: ‘You are in a tent. It’s vast and cold outside …”
The tent is made of paper and she (or you?) must fill the entire surface with writing. This strange image of the tent, paradoxically both vulnerable and safe, and sustained by the incessant process of writing, is one of many small meditations on being a writer.
At the outset Atwood lets us know she will have nothing to do with memoirs. In the first piece she sheds memories and memorabilia in a seemingly headlong rush to ‘no attachment”. In the second she describes what she calls ‘the clothing dream” in which she claims not to recognise her earlier identities.
How like Atwood. Not for her the cashmere shawl of gathered memories — however richly successful and interesting that may seem to her readers. Of her own life story she says, ‘I’m taking it apart. It’s mostly a question of editing. If you’d wanted a narrative line, you should have asked earlier when I still knew everything.” She cuts herself loose from the enormous critical Atwood industry that has surrounded her since the 1970s when she published her first poems and novels, from the vast swathes of words written about her. She looks old age in the eye. She is a step ahead and, in her own way, taking a characteristically sharp look at her essential self and the issues that still matter to her.
Most of these pieces have been published before in magazines or other collections, and cover a wide range of issues. In Resources of the Ikarians and Thylacine Ragout she takes on rampant consumerism and the notion of economic growth. Chicken Licken Goes Too Far is a very funny swipe at complacency, ignorance and the powers that be. And in Take Charge she presents five mini-stories, of increasing hysteria in which nonsensical orders are disputed. This piece contains some priceless invented words of which ‘pixelwit” is the best. The position of women in the world today is examined in three pieces: Bring Back Mom, Heritage House and Post Colonial.
Bleak is the word that often comes to mind in Atwood’s work: for example her merciless portrayal of childhood misery in Cat’s Eye, her crack at the stupid complicity of women in their own subjection in A Handmaid’s Tale. And then there is the deadpan tone of Oryx and Crake, in which she semi-seriously spoofs speculative fiction and more especially the worst aspects of horror end-of-the-world adventure movies. The grimly ambiguous ending of Oryx and Crake is particularly chilling.
Yet there is always something invigorating and bracing about her. And so with The Tent: it is and isn’t a refuge. This austere and blackly funny set of snippets is as odd and skillful as her drawings, which accompany the text. Sometimes blatantly, dementedly silly, it is sustained by conscientious consciousness.