Book: OLD BABES IN THE WOOD

Author: Margaret Atwood

Publication: Doubleday

Price: ₹999

Margaret Atwood’s newest collection of short stories comes after a decade-long wait. It is a gathering of fifteen luminous poetic presences, expertly and sensitively strung together in three sections. The stories are of varying lengths and subjects, but together reinforce concerns that both characterise Atwood’s lifelong literary preoccupations and showcase the formidable stylistic virtuosity that age seems to have intensified in her. Grief, loss, friendship, and art find effulgent reflection through the eagle mind of the grand old dame of Canadian literature in this profoundly moving selection.

The book is dedicated to Graeme Gibson, Atwood’s companion of 48 years, who passed away in 2019, along with “readers”, “family”, and friends, present and absent. This book, then, is primarily, but not exclusively, a response to the fact of physical death, just as actual death is neither the foremost nor the only stimulus for grief. The bookended sections, “Tig and Nell” and “Nell and Tig”, perform the heavy lifting in the work of mourning, chronicling in controlled detail the seemingly trivial people, places and incidents that give richness and texture to a long life lived in true companionship.

Nell’s memory of times both before and after Tig is artfully crafted in these pieces that invite comparisons to Atwood and Gibson’s partnership and ruminate upon loss, the mutability of life, and its cognates. “First Aid” wonders at the special kind of paradoxical obliviousness humans harbour about death, “Two Scorched Men” recounts encounters with two friends singed in the conflagration of war, and “Morte de Smudgie” mourns a beloved cat with self-deprecating wit and heartbreaking absurdity. “A Dusty Lunch” returns to the War experience, trying to reconstruct, from poems and verse fragments left by Tig’s brigadier father and his single bit of correspondence with the famous WWII correspondent, Martha Gellhorn, the inner life of a young soldier amid the unspeakable pathos of war. Other pieces in this closing section of the volume articulate widowhood (“Widow”), discover something new about the dearly departed Tig, and play upon the polysemy of the titular “babes” by making octogenarian Nell and her younger sister perform wryly-recounted athletic feats despite creaky knees in the dilapidated country cottage of their childhood (“Old Babes in the Wood”).

While deeply poignant, pungently self-reflexive, and transcendentally mature, the bread and butter of this sandwich of mourning balance any risk of blandness by adding piquancy to the filling. Titled “My Evil Mother,” this meaty and astringent, yet surprisingly bittersweet, middle begins with a gem of a tribute to parenting, female relationships and the power of imaginative language to affect lives in material terms. There’s a tentacled alien whose job it is to entertain quarantined humans with auto-translated and hilariously imperfect renditions of human myths (“Impatient Griselda”); a poignant dialogue with the ghost of George Orwell (“The Dead Interview”); a Handmaid’s Tale-like dystopia (“Freeforall”); the soul of a recently-exterminaxted snail in the body of a female bank employee (“Metempsychosis”); and the voice of Hypatia of Alexandria contemplating her horrific end with stinging nonchalance (“Death by Clamshell”). The bite of the last is slightly lessened by a minor factual inaccuracy: “I, on the other hand, continue to exist among you,” says the dead astronomer, but she has not had a “film or streamed series.” Alejandro Amenábar did make Agora in 2009 with Rachel Weisz as Hypatia.

If death is the brooding presence in this volume, age is the casement through which it looms, albeit not very menacingly. Equilibrium in life’s ravaging storms of despair is repeatedly shown to be a gift of old age. One of the most delightful stories of the collection is “Airborne: A Symposium” in which a group of retired female academics discuss writing a proposal for the creation of an “endowed chair for an emerging female” at a university. The story masterfully invokes fraught issues of feminist ethics and politics with devastating characterisations of the “old babes” it portrays couched in a frothy, irreverent style. Placed almost exactly in the centre of the volume, this story holds the personal and the political together in fine balance.

With the death of youth comes the death of sex, bringing with it the possibility of true friendship born out of empathy, both between and among the sexes. The old friends at the end of “Bad Teeth” can thus resolve an argument over a slanderous claim by laughing at their younger selves:

Csilla laughs, showing her child’s teeth. “I’m a shit, like I said.”

After a moment, Lynne laughs too. All those days with Csilla, all those years, turning to smoke, evaporating. So soon gone. “You’re my very dear old friend, and I love you,” she says.

Csilla smiles, her best, most innocent, most angelic pearly-toothed smile. “Do I hear a but?”

“No but,” says Lynne.

Old Babes in the Wood celebrates the mutual understanding, despite personal failings and foibles, that mortal individuals may acquire by growing old. The triumph of Atwood’s art lies in the building of a worldview in which old age and imminent death are transformed into symbols of hope. And through this visionary crafting, the book seems to claim with Donnean aplomb, “Death, thou shalt die.”