The bizarre tone is characteristic of the collection. These tales focus on slightly rank topics and seem determined to rankle. There is also the feeling that something is missing. The tales themselves are "not unconnected". But, rather like meat products and enemas, the links have more to do with texture than narrative drive.
They also require a little imagination on the reader's part. The question, with this collection, is how far the idea of connection can be stretched. The tales fall, roughly, into groups. Like The Penelopiad, the revisionist take on the Odyssey that Atwood published last year, a number describe the margins of literary history. We encounter Horatio who grumbles about "doing my best as second banana during the Elsinore affair", while "Salome Was a Dancer" takes its heroine to a strip joint and recasts John the Baptist as an RE teacher. All of these stories, accompanied by Atwood's own whimsically macabre line drawings, are engaging and sharply funny. Their disparate narrative origins are held together by a common interest in the question of narrative survival. As the would-be character in "Plot for Exotics" finds out, "you have to apply" for a part in a plot, and the competition is fierce.
So much of Atwood's work is driven by myth and archetypes. With the inclusion of figures from the margins of myth, this collection is no exception. However, archetypes only really work in a narrative if they are intended to serve some sort of purpose. One of the questions The Tent raises is how much Atwood is willing to own even a marginal part in her own collection, and to what end. The question of the presence of the author in the text is one that Atwood has repeatedly addressed in interviews, and she counters it again in the opening tale here, "Life Stories", in which a voice asks, "Why the hunger for these?:
If you'd wanted the narrative line, you should have asked earlier, when I still knew everything and was more than willing to tell". While this line soon disappears as the collection progresses, even a narrative tone becomes increasingly hard to locate. What seems to survive is resignation. As in "Winter's Tales", there is the strain of a voice that is getting on and has "decided to encourage the young":
Once I wouldn't have done this, but now I have nothing to lose. The young are not my rivals. Fish are not the rivals of stone. So I will encourage them open-handedly. I will encourage them en masse. I'll fling encouragement over them like rice at a wedding. They are the young, a collective noun like the electorate.
I'll encourage them indiscriminately, whether they deserve it or not. Anyway, I can't tell them apart.
Most of the stories in The Tent express envy for those who are not weighed down by the past. As Atwood puts it in "Orphan Stories", "Their yachts are slimmer, their lines trimmer than ours . . . . They won't play by the well-wrought rules, they despise the prize". The internal rhymes, here, are handled with comic virtuosity. Elsewhere, she repeatedly moves her parts of speech, and plays on puns. Hitchhikers follow the "rule of thumb", and a disgruntled lion thinks about the fur trade and "follows suit". Throughout The Tent there is a feeling that sense itself has become resigned to stylistic exhaustion. Like each of Atwood's earlier collections, it is intensely metafictional. It revolves around the ways in which narrative itself carries baggage, and simultaneously longs for, and seems terrified by, the idea of being free from such responsibility. Atwood's interest is not only in stories about orphans, but in the idea of the orphaned, or parentless, story.
These concerns emerge clearly in the title story, where the person trapped in the paper tent writes on the walls with a sort of mania: "you write as if your life depended on it, your life and theirs". Near the conclusion, the voice asks itself, "You think this writing of yours . . . is capable of protecting anyone at all? . .
