. It's an illusion, the belief that your doodling is a kind of armour". As the collection progresses, it invites the same sort of questions. One is compelled to ask quite who Atwood is arming herself for, or against. The audience, and the target, of these narratives seems determinedly undetermined. For the most part, the virtuosity of the writing distracts the reader from this problem.

Besides, labelling things, as "Orphan Stories" reveals, is a slippery business:

"Names are arbitrary, but orphans' names are more arbitrary than most.

They make up their names as they go along. Call me Ishmael, they say. Or else:

Call me Ishmael, but call me often. Or else: Don't call me Ishmael, call me Anonymous. Call me No-name. Call me In Vain". But beneath all this, the question of what the voice in "The Tent" means by "your life, and theirs".

Atwood tackles this head-on in "Post-colonial".

We did that, we think, to them . . . .We say the word them, believing we know what we mean by it; we say the word we, even though we were not born at the time . . .

. But who are we now, apart from the question Who are we now? We all share that question. Who are we, now, inside the we corral, the we palisade, the we fortress, and who are they? . . . It's a constant worry, this we, this them.

But Atwood is fighting certain quarters. Many of these stories were first published in order to aid charitable causes, ranging from the World Wildlife Fund to the Indian Ocean Tsunami Earthquake appeal. In this sense the "them" who incite this constant worry, are the people we don't feel for, those neglected in the globalized clamour. This reading, however, is to make things too easy. While "Post colonial" seems to be a tirade about the way we complacently "muse in the museum", it also satirizes the agonies of postcolonial etiquette. It suggests that ethical discussion is transformed into a polite exercise in grammatical juggling and questions of address.