Old age is the theme at the heart of Margaret Atwood’s wise and witty 55th book, but as the characters in this compelling collection of nine tales inch ever closer to the grave, they journey emotionally back to whatever wounded them in the cradle.
In her book Negotiating With the Dead, Atwood mused that “writing has to do with darkness, and a desire or perhaps a compulsion to enter it, and, with luck, to illuminate it, and to bring something back out to the light”. Atwood here delves deep into her characters’ darkest impulses including wanting to hurt those who long ago hurt them.
The world’s earliest fossilised stromatolites lend this collection its title, since the word derives from the Greek stroma, a mattress, coupled with the root word for stone. In the title story, Verna is on a cruise to the Arctic during which she visits stromatolites: “Stone mattress: a fossilised cushion, formed by layer upon layer of blue-green algae building up into a mound or dome. It was this very same blue-green algae that created the oxygen they are now breathing. Isn’t that astonishing?”
It’s not only geological formations that Atwood renders astonishing, but the formation of the human personality too, how experiences accrue “layer upon layer”: she skilfully both builds up and peels away those layers, showing Verna’s burning resentment and “spark of defiant anger” for an old flame, Bob – who happens to be on the same cruise, and with whom she once danced to the song Hearts Made of Stone. Verna exacts belated revenge, ensuring Bob finds himself between a rock and a hard place.
Stone Mattress is filled with characters who have made their bed but are loth to lie in it – beds often tangled with a toxic mix of infidelity, envy and thwarted lust. Several characters are writers, hoping that language might transcend the deathbed and offer immortality. Indeed authorship is a pervasive theme; in one story characters crop up from Atwood’s 1993 novel The Robber Bride.
Atwood illuminates heavy themes with a lightness of touch, giving insight not only into the nature of stone but the trials and tribulations of flesh and blood.
Stone Mattress is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). Click here to buy it for £14.99 with free UK p&p
