Good Bones by Margaret Atwood

was living in France as work on
Good Bones
was nearing completion. Because of a French postal strike, the cover had to be sent by courier, and was initially lost, with the consequence that this exotic creature was trapped briefly in some French dead letter office. Clearly, someone did not want her wisdom loosed on the world.
    In an unexpected way, it helps to think of France in connection with
Good Bones
, for in describing the form of the stories, the closest I can come is the
conte
, that curious French form that is midway between parable, fairy tale, and story. The French speak of
un vrai conte
for an improbable story and
un conte vrai
for a true story. And there is the
conte de bonne femme
, or
conte bleu
, the traditional old wives’ tale, which Atwood might be said to have reinvented as the wise woman’s tale.
    There has always been something of the sibylline touch about Atwood. In
Good Bones
there are twenty-seven stories, written mostly between 1986 and 1992. As she sent letters across the Atlantic indicating revisions and precise directions for the arrangement of stories, Atwood remarked to her editor that she had “found” “Third Handed,” the last story to be added to the collection: “I knew there was a twenty-seventh piece – I hate even numbers and much prefer multiples of nine … it goes in between Homelanding and Death Scenes.” And one feels the pungent whiff of the white witch’s magic in the brew.
    If there is one book that lurks behind these tales, it is
The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales
. As a six-year-old child, Atwood read the 1944 unexpurgated Pantheon edition of
Grimm
, 210 tales long, with Josef Scharl’s gothic illustrations of skulls, hangmen, witches, ogres, and other remarkable creatures. In 1983 she recalled those stories with their “barrels of nails, red-hot shoes, removable tongues and eyes, cannibalism and various forms of open-heart surgery,” noting that “the book I’ve re-read most frequently, on a lifetime count, is
Grimm’s Fairy Tales.…
I’ve been reading this book, cover to cover and here and there, off and on, for 37 years.” Her childhood favourites were the wonderfully grotesque “The Juniper Tree” and “Fitcher’s Bird” (an archaic version of the more familiar “Blue Beard” recorded by the seventeenth-century French raconteur Charles Perrault).
    In the original
Grimm
, before the stories were child-proofed and the bloodthirsty bits eliminated, the females had magic powers. “The women in these stories are not the passive zombies we were at one point led to think they were,” Atwood explains. The princesses “do as much rescuing as the princes do, though they use magic, perseverance and cleverness rather than cold steel to do it.” The narrative voice in
Good Bones
is one of those adventurous heroines, using disguises, ambiguity, and subversion to tell her stories. They entertain but they alsoinstruct, and, like the original
Grimm
, they do not always have happy endings.
    In
Good Bones
, Atwood rewrites the traditional Grimm characters: the little hen, the ugly sister, the harpy with her “coiffeur of literate serpents,” giving them contemporary voices. She plays with fairy-tale beginnings: “There was once a poor girl, as beautiful as she was good, who lived with her wicked stepmother in a house in the forest,” hilariously rewriting the story to meet the prescriptions of political correctness till the story disappears, as does its mystery.
    Atwood creates her own
contes
. One of my favourites is “In Love With Raymond Chandler.” Somehow she always finds her eccentric way into the heart of the matter. Here she reminds us why we are attached to Chandler. He is not the detective writer of grisly murders and steamy sex, but the detective of furniture, of those antimacassars and mahogany desks, of bedroom suites.
    Two of the
contes
were commissioned by
Michigan Quarterly Review
for special issues on the female and the male body. The first