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Margaret Atwood is revered. She is, as the dust jacket of The Tent (Bloomsbury, £12.99), reminds us, "one of the world's most celebrated authors" - a Booker-prize winner, praised for her intelligence, wit, imagination and irony. And she's no one-trick pony: her oeuvre takes in novels, short stories, poetry, children's books and lit crit. A new book, therefore, is a reason for rejoicing. So hail The Tent, a collection of short stories - 35 in 155 pages - beautifully printed with odd, but not unpleasant, Art Nouveau-style cartoons by Atwood herself.
On reflection, the term "short stories" doesn't do the contents of this book justice: they're fictional essays, brief reflections, surreal homilies, reworkings of myths, literature and biblical tales - storylets, if you like.
Genre-busting they unquestionably are, yet here the excitement must
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Margaret Atwood’s latest stories are a genre-busting bore, says tim auld
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stop. There are a couple of passable pieces - Impenetrable Forest, for instance, which is a nicely cynical tale about the limits of philanthropy, and one good verse about how mum makes everything all right: Bring Back Mom: An Invocation. But the rest should have remained between the covers of the author's notepad.
The writing is airily whimsical where it would be slyly satirical, ponderous where it would be charged with meaning, and pretentious where it would be witty and allusive. There's a grindingly anachronistic monologue by Hamlet's "mate" Horatio, and a lumbering mockery of literary conventions entitled Three Novels I Won't Write Soon (a book like this can't bear the weight of such irony).
These are warm-up exercises for a writer and good for Atwood. But bad for the reader. Who, after all, would pay to hear a concert pianist practise her scales? 
FIRST
POSTED MARCH 28, 2006
Knitting
Suite francaise
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