Margaret Atwood settles her accounts with this new short story collection

Margaret Atwood is in the first rank of literary fame and her trophy cabinet is handsomely stocked; yet she has never fully shaken off the suspicion that her politics have spoiled her writing. Despite the practised prose, delicate observation and steady-handed drip-feed of plot, there sometimes rises off the page a teacherly spirit that grabs you by the lapels and says, ‘Now listen here’. Gender relations, climate change; Atwood would probably say these subjects are more important than whether the direction of a book isn’t just a bit too obvious. And maybe she’s right.

But it bodes well for the reader that in Stone Mattress, her new collection of ‘tales’, she gravitates towards a more personal subject. In most of them, people in their seventies or thereabouts (like Atwood), often literary figures, are again confronted with the one vexed question of their youth.