Short Stories: 'All that anxiety and anger, those dubious good intentions, those tangled lives, that blood." Thus Margaret Atwood sums up the elements of a life that, looking back, is compressed into telling vignettes and wry appraisals of this or that moment of agitation or insight. Moral Disorder consists of 11 related stories, all dealing with episodes experienced by Atwood's heroine Nell, wife, mother, stepmother, sister, daughter, university teacher and publishers' editor.
The book opens in the present, with Nell and her husband Tig, whose real name is Gilbert, approaching old age but not yet embedded in senility. "Not yet is aspirated, like the h in honour. It's the silent not yet. We don't say it out loud." Not yet.
This opening story is called The Bad News, bad news which comes at the beleaguered couple from all sides, news about the state of the world, or about their own incipient deterioration - mental disorder - news arriving like word of the barbarian invasion which destroyed the Roman settlement at Glanum in the south of France in the third century AD, a spot to which Nell sometimes finds herself transported in her imagination. She is also transported back in time to her own past, as in a series of snapshots: here she sits diligently preparing a layette for an expected baby brother or sister (it's a sister); here a Halloween disguise transforms her into a figure of dread.
The Art of Cooking and Serving, story number two, is a quietly hilarious portrayal of an 11-year-old knitter of miniscule matinee coats and bootees. This version shows Nell as a handicrafts enthusiast and desperate devotee of an old-fashioned decorum and etiquette. Ah, but there's an anarchic streak somewhere in there which cramps the "good girl" image.
Move forward a number of years, and Nell is a high-school student with a smashing English teacher and a boyfriend inclined to be pig-headed over the interpretation of the Browning poem, My Last Duchess. Literature is supplying Nell with a whole range of "hapless, annoying, dumb-bunny girls" - Tess, Ophelia, and so on - to react against, as new-fangled social pressures begin to kick in. It's goodbye to Mrs Sarah Field Splint of the immaculately fresh doilies and tiny fern arrangements on the breakfast table, and hello to wives in escape mode, and the smoking of dope by grown-up people wearing wooden love beads. By the time we reach the late 1960s the stories have switched from a first- to a third-person narration, and Nell has run off to the country with Tig, whose first wife Oona, not yet an encumbrance, has more or less abetted this departure. It enables her to lead her own life on child-free weekends.
Nell has a lot to learn about life in the country: an injured goose, for example, won't come home from a neighbour's with a splint on its leg, but "in oven-ready form". Death by misadventure, combined with the slaughter of edible animals, is the order of the day. Hens, lambs, a white horse called Gladys, all come to a sorry end. Life goes on. Nell becomes pregnant. Her sister Lizzie - she of the baby layette - has her sanity endangered by a misdiagnosis of schizophrenia and accompanying medication. A tragedy is averted.
The time comes for Nell and Tig to move back to the city, to Toronto. Like Atwood's earlier authority on women domestic novelists of the 19th century (Hair Jewellery, 1977), Nell finds she has more in common with such low-key purveyors of intimate, homely truths than she does with Gothic romance. "I'd never got over the Grade Two reader," she confesses at one point (The Other Place); "the one featuring a father . . . a mother . . . two children . . . a cat and a dog, all living in a white house with frilly window curtains." This kind of self-mockery is a significant element in Atwood's individual, wonderfully pointed assessments of manners and mores.
All the stories in the current collection are crafted with the author's customary vivacity and expertise - the slightly sideways approach by means of which she homes in on an issue. But the final two, narrated again in the first person like the opening episodes, are out-and-out tours de force. They are tributes to Nell's parents, whose old-age confusions bring us round full-circle to The Bad News. In The Labrador Fiasco, Nell's one-time entomologist father somehow gets absorbed into his own favourite tale, the one he'd liked to hear over and over, about a failed expedition into uncharted territory, the wilds of Labrador, in 1903. All kinds of ironies and resonances swirl about this undertaking of Atwood's - and it's the same thing with The Boys at the Lab, when it's Nell's mother who is the recipient of stories about herself, about her past.
Moral Disorder is an important collection by a masterly storyteller - and self-reflexive, in that it celebrates the story's power to heighten, evoke and illuminate all our disorderly lives.
Patricia Craig is a critic and biographer. Her Ulster Anthology will be published by Blackstaff in November
Moral Disorder By Margaret Atwood Bloomsbury, 260pp. £15.99