Wit and humanity in the darkest of places

• Published date: 18 March 2023
• Publication title: Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland)

Like Atwood, Nell is a sage voice on the moments big and small that accumulate over time to form a life. The quote above is taken from the book's second story, Two Scorched Men, which recounts the friendship of two French men with very different temperaments. Like Atwood, Nell sets down personal fortunes and misfortunes, while placing them in the context of a savage world: "At that time I was a collector of the many excuses people had come up with for butchering one another." Like Atwood, she is, throughout the collection, charting the trajectory of civilisation over decades, centuries, millenniums, the highs and lows, the depressingly circular nature of things, past horrors repeating in modern times, the present day defined succinctly as "the puritanical moment we are passing through"

The 15 stories show Atwood's range as a writer, her ingenuity, the ease with which she switches from literary to science fiction. Split into three parts, the dystopian or sci-fi stories are grouped in the middle of the collection and feature, among other eccentricities, a snail trapped in the wrong body, an interview with a deceased George Orwell, an impassioned monologue from Hypatia of Alexandria, an alien reciting fairy tales and a pandemic take on The Handmaid's Tale. Thematically we are firmly in Atwood territory: autocracy, misogyny, environmental free fall. Apocalypse now.

These stories have a whimsical quality, which is perhaps an issue of form. Dystopian fiction is arguably better suited to a novel, or a long story such as George Saunders's recent Liberation Day, where there is space to explain the rules, the world, the premise. Atwood's surrealist stories can feel occasionally, as with the Orwell interview, a bit meta or self-indulgent for the humour to land, but on the whole her trademark wit is as sharp as ever.

In The Evil Mother, an adult daughter looks back on her childhood with a mother who said she was a witch: "Avenging a toad. Pointing at a tree. Who could handle that kind of thing, in a mother?" In Bad Teeth, narrator Lynne highlights the perks of ageing: "You can make six kinds of a fool of...