Having thoroughly enjoyed several of Margaret Atwood’s novels, from The Handmaid’s Tale through Surfacing to Alias Grace, I was intrigued to see Murder in the Dark described as a collection of ‘short fictions and prose poems’. I make several long bus journeys a week, and if you’re sandwiched between giggling schoolgirls and someone booming down their mobile phone while the guy at the back is singing along to Alice Cooper on his ipod, it’s not an atmosphere conducive to getting absorbed in a five-hundred page novel. But these little gems take just a couple of minutes each to read and each demands to be savoured before you go on to the next one.
There are altogether twenty-seven short stories and prose poems in this collection. I was drawn by the concept of ’shoppers for words’ in ‘Mute’, where words are picked over like apples, and you can begin to detect a bad smell, presumably from overuse. There are wonderfully imaginative descriptions, in ‘Strawberries’, for example, of a ‘conical fine-haired dark red multi-seeded dwarf berry rendering itself in dry flat two dimensional detail like background foliage by one of the crazier Victorian painters’ – all this for a tiny red berry. The final piece entitled ‘The Third Eye’ explores the difference between ‘vision’ and ‘a vision’; at first you have to close your other two eyes in order to use the third eye, but after practice you will find that ‘what you see depends partly on what you want to look at and partly on how.’ I love the idea that if you don’t resist the third eye, one day you will see everything glowing from inside and ‘you will touch the light itself.’
I feel that is difficult to do justice to a book such as this which is like a microcosm of Atwood’s work. There is so much here: one piece will make you laugh, another might remind you of your own childhood, a third could make you feel uncomfortable or set you thinking about things in a new light. There is so much that is unexpected, a sure sign of a wonderfully creative mind. It is like an anthology that you can keep going back and dipping into, as I’m sure I will. If you haven’t read Atwood before, this would be a good taster, and if you have enjoyed any of her full-length novels, you will be bound to appreciate something in this collection of brilliance.
Read the full-length review by frangliz on the Curious Book Fans website.
