Richard Oh

The Tent
By Margaret Atwood
155 Pages
Bloomsbury

If you were a multiple award-winning author and in between a serious book project, what would you do? Under the pressure from your publisher, you’d publish stuff that might in all likelihood be consigned to oblivion in one of your drawers. Stuff you desultorily jotted down on one of those insomniac nights, or rambling thoughts plucked from an afternoon torpor.

Now if you were Margaret Atwood, the scribbles, desultory or not, could very well be brilliant insights of our lives. The Tent is such a mongrel of a book. It’s hard whether to describe it as non-fiction, autobiographical or short stories without plots or just sundry thoughts from a great writer. It consists of three parts, each containing ten to fourteen prose pieces about three to four pages in length. These are small bites of fabulous writings, which could easily have been drafts that had been excised from her many books.
But on closer scrutiny these are quite personal reflections written almost in fable-like fashion. The first part of the book describes the being of the writer. It tells of the writer’s life: being an elderly established writer advising the young (Encouraging the Young), a writer’s loss of her own identity (Voice and Impenetrable Forest), media intrusion (No More Photo). In Part Two, you’ll find the flights of a writer’s imagination in tales such as Plots for Exotics, Our Cat Enters Heaven, Chicken Little Goes too Far, and The Animals Reject Their Names and Things Return to their Origins and Three Novels I Won’t Write Soon. Part Three can be easily described as a writer’s nightmarish visions: the Tent, Something Has Happened, But It could Still, and Eating the Birds.

Each of these tales is like a prose poem, lyrical but biting, a world unto itself. Reading these tales reminds me so much of Italo Calvino and the folksy feel of his stories. In their simplicity and stylistic diversity, they shine with the refracting brilliance of a gem.

In the Tent, the sense of futility for a writer in a world at conflict is described powerfully. “Why do you think this writing of yours, this graphomania in a flimsy cave, this scribbling back and forth and up and down over the walls of what is beginning to seem like a prison, is capable of protecting anyone at all? Yourself included. It’s an illusion, the belief that your doodling is a kind of armor, a kind of charm, because no one knows better than you do how fragile our tent really is. Already there’s a clomping of leather-covered feet, there’s a scratching, there’s a scrabbling, there’s a sound of rasping breath. Wind comes in, our candle tips over and flares up, and a loose tent-flap catches fire, and through the widening black-edged gap you can see the eyes of the howlers, red and shining in the light from your burning paper shelter, but you keep on writing anyway because what else can you do?”

Our Cat Enters Heaven is a whimsical tale about a cat that dies and goes to Heaven and finds God up on the tree. He goes up to God, who appears to him as a cat. “Meow, said our cat. Meow, said God. Actually it was more like a roar. I always thought you were a cat, said our cat, but I wasn’t sure. In heaven all things are revealed, said God. This is the form in which I choose to appear to you. I’m glad you aren’t a dog, said our cat. Do you think I could have my testicles back?” Then the cat notices the little creatures scuttling here and there, he asks God, “Well, how about some of those mice? They aren’t mice, said God. But catch as many as you like. Don’t kill them right away. Make them suffer. You mean, play with them? said our cat. I used to get in trouble for that. It’s a question of semantics, said God. You won’t get in trouble for that here. Our cat chose to ignore this remark, as he did not know what “semantics” was. He did not intend to make a fool of himself. If they aren’t mice, what are they? he said. Already he’d pounced on one. He held it down under his paw. It was kicking, and uttering tiny shrieks. They’re the souls of human beings who have been bad on Earth, said God, half-closing its yellowy-green eyes. Now if you don’t mind, it’s time for my nap. What are they doing in heaven then? said our cat. Our heaven is their hell, said God. I like a balanced universe.”

In a satirical piece about a writer advising to the young, Atwood waxes acidic. “What a fine and shining person I am, so much kinder than when I’d just finished being young myself. I was severe then; my standards were exacting. The young – I felt – were allowed to get away with far too much, as I had been. But now I’m generosity itself. Affably I smile and dole.” Then she admits her ulterior motive, “On second thought, my motives are less pure than they appear. They are murkier. They are lurkier.” We soon find out why in this confession. “I won’t fatten them in cages, though. I won’t ply them with poisoned fruit items. I won’t change them into clockwork images or talking shadows. I won’t drain out their life’s blood. They can do all those things for themselves.”

After the bilious satire, the grim asides, you would think you’re reading a writer in her menopausal funk. Atwood, in the closing tale But It Could Still, however, knowingly admits to this truth. “At this dim season of the year we hunger for such tales. Winter’s tales, they are. We want to huddle round them, as if around a small but cheerful fire. The sun sets at four, the temperature plummets, the wind howls, the snow cascades down. Though you nearly froze your fingers off, you did get the tulips planted, just in time. In four months they’ll come up, you have faith in that, and they’ll look like the picture in the catalogue. … what would you call them if they were in a story? Would they be happy endings, or happy beginnings? But they aren’t in a story, and neither are you. You tucked them back under the mulch and the dead leaves, however. It was the right thing to do on the darkest day of the year.”

The final line again echoes that same “What else can you do?” refrain. There’s a sense that the world spins around year long in the best and worst of times, a writer, stripped of her power to make any changes, is still needed because people still want to huddle round a small cheerful fire. Atwood radiates warmth most confidently in these wintry days of dissent and discontent.

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