Margaret Atwood is trapped in a gloomy prison of words as she explores the tortuous creative process in The Tent, says Anita Sethi

The Tent

by Margaret Atwood

Bloomsbury £12.99, pp164

The Tent is a tricky book to categorise; its publisher describes it as 'mini-fiction essays'. Between its sturdy covers is an assortment of fables, reworked myths, nightmares, conceits, two poems, seven of Atwood's dubious line drawings and plenty of white space surrounding the dark subject matter of growth and decay. In the pieces that recast famous stories, we hear from Helen of Troy, Salome, Horatio, King Log and Chicken Licken, but the most enduring voice is Margaret Atwood's own, that of a celebrated writer who is terrified that her voice has begun its 'shrivelling'.

Rather than being polished, these fragments feel like surplus jottings, writing exercises, gloomy off-cuts from the creative process that wouldn't have seen the light of day if not written by such an eminent name.

This book has felt the 'virtues of scissors': in 'Life Stories', the narrator experiments with telling her life story by 'taking it apart'. While this can leave a beautiful sparseness, Atwood's vice is to snip to abstraction and platitude, not leaving enough flesh-and-blood particularity to engage our sympathies.

Brevity isn't only stylistic, but moralistic; various narrators complain of a lifetime's junk obscuring their identity. The mind, too, is a terribly cluttered place: in 'Impenetrable Forest', a man's head is so 'full of trees' he can't see the wood. Yet when he does hack his way through the psychological wilderness, he discovers beneath only further lack of direction.

The search for authenticity isn't helped by words, for Atwood's fictional worlds are 'dizzy with aphasia'. But the raw nerve ends of the creative impulse never die; on the final page, bulbs nestle in the frozen earth, 'intending to grow, despite everything'.

The book powerfully exhibits the human consciousness in conversation with itself, struggling to establish a voice amid the cacophony. In pieces such as 'Bottle', Atwood scoops her speakers out of any context, leaving only their eerie voices alone on the page. She dramatises the troubled boundary between 'I' and 'you', many pages haunted by a mysterious 'you', a silent listener. The narrators question whether the person they are addressing might actually be themselves, dialogue and monologue spookily confused: 'So there's nothing to you. You're only in my head.' Being trapped with these voices can be suffocating; in the metaphorical title story, a hubristic writer's words are their 'prison'. Despite the realisation that their flimsy 'paper tent' is no 'armour' from the world's 'howling wilderness', they are compelled to create.

But although the writers' 'doodling' dissociates them from the world, it paradoxically brings them closer to it. In the most moving piece, the poem 'Bring Back Mom: An Invocation', the speaker communes with her dead mother, yearning to resurrect in language the love she has lost in life, to heal 'damaged memory', so 'the holes in the world will be mended'.

The Tent exposes the nuts and bolts of the tortuous creative process, but Atwood's talent struggles to breathe inside these claustrophobic prisons.