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The Tent
When she won the Booker after three tumbles, I celebrated. For over 30 years, she has written works of striking originality and imagination. In The Blind Assassin, she took the art of story telling to new heights. Atwood’s female characters in this work were as complex and intriguing as they were in Cat’s Eye, which is why I am so disappointed with her latest offering, The Tent. The blurb told me this would be "a collection of smart and entertaining fictional essays, the genre of her previous books Good Bones and Murder in the Dark." Most of it appears like a collection of random thoughts, all of which end before actually taking off. There is the amazingly dissatisfying Clothing Dreams, followed even more closely by Bottle. The others begin and end in a sheer display of high-school essay writing. "You don’t understand much, he says. Why do you think I was lost in the impenetrable forest in the first place?" No prizes for guessing where this came from: a chapter titled The Impenetrable Forest, of course. Another one titled Encouraging The Young begins this way: "I have decided to encourage the young... I will encourage them open-handedly, I will encourage them en masse. I’ll fling encouragement over them like rice at a wedding." If this isn’t absolutely unimaginative, then I don’t know what else is. Prose like this would have been mildly acceptable if it came from a budding author, but when it comes from someone of Atwood’s calibre, it merely leaves you shocked beyond words. Why do publishers take stuff like this? Do they really believe it will sell? I can’t imagine it being used beyond the realms of libraries for students who would be doing research on her writing. What are we likely to see next: her shopping list? |
I’VE been a huge fan of
Margaret Atwood since I received my first collection of Atwood books
from a family I had stayed with in Canada during my university days. As
I read page after page of The Handmaid’s Tale, I was in awe of
her literary prowess.