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“... anyone it can exploit to empty bedpans. I once imagined that The Children of Men was a sequel to Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), just set a few years later, and in a less benighted country. In Atwood’s novel, it’s still possible to see a pregnant woman, but she’s a ‘magic presence’, a ...”

“... Margaret Atwood’s 11th novel delivers two huge surprises: a male protagonist and an action-movie plot. Atwood has never written a novel from a male point of view before, and John Updike was among the reviewers who complained that the men in The Blind Assassin* were mysterious and unlovable ...”

“... limitations of the structure are always in evidence. There is no doubt at all about the Canadian Margaret Atwood’s being a novelist. Both Lady Oracle (first published in 1976 and now appearing in paperback) and Bodily Harm are splendid demonstrations of the contemporary novelist’s craft. To read them together is to note an interesting ...”

“... inside of the human head, but that is wrong. They know less, that’s why they write.’ So says Margaret Atwood in her collection of stories, Dancing Girls. They know less, but she might have added that they find out more; they might wish they had not had to, but there is no going back on what they have learned. ...”

“... Margaret Atwood’s new novel is a reworking of the Odyssey, told largely from Penelope’s point of view. The Penelopiad is presented by its publisher as a retelling of a myth, but it isn’t quite that. The story of Odysseus’ return home from the Trojan War would qualify as a myth, but the Odyssey does not, if a myth is a story that doesn’t depend for its resonance and power on the details and language of any one version ...”

“... in which more purely ‘literary’ writers have felt free to indulge: Huxley, Orwell, even the Margaret Atwood of The Handmaid’s Tale. And not unpredictably, the results of these efforts have been as amateurish as analogous experiments in the realm of the detective or crime story (from Dostoevsky to Nabokov, if you like), but including a message or ...”

“... always been for women to answer. It has become clear that women’s novels can answer them, too. Margaret Atwood knows all about the harassing particularities of family life, and has written about them with a memorable edge of resentment. Her high standing is largely derived from the way in which she has pushed these acerbically intimate perceptions ...”

“... art is to use them without insistence or inner glee. Talented women like Nadine Gordimer and Margaret Atwood are very good at this. Both have styles that are frostily kind, sharp and dry-eyed, and the Atwood stories in particular remind me of those by an expert in the art from a previous generation, Elizabeth ...”

“... Fear is a powerful stimulant,’ says Offred, the heroine of Margaret Atwood’s chilling tale of the near future. Trained at the Rachel and Leah Centre and habited in red, Offred belongs to a quasi-religious order of ‘sacred vessels’, ‘two-legged wombs’ whose task it is to produce the next generation of the ruling élite in the Republic of Gilead ...”

“... passionately committed to the most private and hidden areas of human life. (One of the stories in Margaret Atwood’s new collection treats very similar imaginings of nuclear war, and we learn in an aside that the central male character of David Plante’s new novel works on a science project related to Star Wars. A lot of writing in the last few years ...”

“... far this is an improvement David Lodge does not profess to know. It is not clear what the title of Margaret Atwood’s Life Before Man is meant to imply, but here we are back with the zombies and automatons of modern fiction. In her earlier novel Surfacing, the setting in the northern Canadian wilds is of some interest, but the characters, presented at ...”

“... Margaret Atwood’s tenth novel is both familiar and new. As it is an Atwood novel, we get eggs, a ravine, shit, snow, an ethereal double or sisterly doppelgänger, a bridge, a river, an act of violence – images and themes from her earlier fiction metamorphosed. The Blind Assassin also possesses the unusual lyrical sensuousness that distinguished Alias Grace (1996), Atwood’s last major work ...”

“... in 1988, and now expanded and updated to include Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and Susan Sontag, Margaret Atwood remarks that the writers have been brought together ‘over what, in some cases, would be their dead bodies’. Dorothy Parker, for instance, says she is ‘a feminist, and God knows I’m loyal to my sex ... But when we paraded through the ...”

“... cultural contexts of human sacrifice, more or less from its speculative prehistoric beginnings to Margaret Atwood’s recent novel The Blind Assassin. To succeed in such an enterprise an author must be fantastically well read, expert in the disposition of large tracts of material in various languages, some of it by great artists and some by no less ...”

“... me who, girlish and unlearned as I am, presume to write to a man who is the father of learning.’ Margaret Cavendish in her 1656 autobiography calls her own work ‘scribbling’ as opposed to her husband’s ‘writing’. The operations of this cultural cringe are intricate. How much is simply the formulaic politeness of eras more unabashedly hierarchical ...”