The agony of grief: Old Babes in the Wood, by Margaret Atwood, reviewed

Margaret Atwood has often resisted auto-biographical interpretations of her work, but it is impossible to read her short story collection Old Babes in the Wood without acknowledging the death in 2019 of her long-term partner Graeme Gibson. Death permeates every page of the book.

Reaching for a comforting layer of fiction, Atwood revives two characters who have appeared previously in her work as stand-ins for herself and her partner: Nell and Tig. The collection’s first third contains stories of the two together, while the end is about Nell on her own after Tig’s death.

Between these is an interlude of unrelated tales, which makes Old Babes something of a patchy work. There are experiments, not all of them successful, such as the imagined conversation between the author and George Orwell via a medium. Or the recycled story ‘Freeforall’, first published just after The Handmaid’s Tale, which reads like an abandoned idea for an alternative to Gilead.