Culture

Margaret Atwood has often resisted auto-biographical interpretations of her work, but it is impossible to read her short story collection Old Babes in the Wood without acknowledging the death in 2019 of her long-term partner Graeme Gibson. Death permeates every page of the book. Reaching for a comforting layer of fiction, Atwood revives two characters who have appeared previously in her work as stand-ins for herself and her partner: Nell and Tig. The collection’s first third contains stories of the two together, while the end is about Nell on her own after Tig’s death. Between these is an interlude of unrelated tales, which makes Old Babes something of a patchy work.

‘I have... found someone to take care of me in the world,’ Marian Evans wrote to her brother in 1857, three years after setting up house with George Henry Lewes. Professing herself ‘well acquainted with his mind and character’, she requested that the modest income from her father’s legacy should in future be paid into her husband’s bank account. A reply from the family solicitor forced her to acknowledge that ‘our marriage is not a legal one, though it is regarded by us both as a sacred bond’. The funds were paid accordingly, but all contact was severed. Very soon, money from Evans’s novels – written under the pseudonym of George Eliot – also began pouring into Lewes’s bank account.

Public readings by James Ellroy would tend to begin like this: Good evening, peepers, prowlers, pederasts, panty sniffers, punks and pimps. I’m James Ellroy, demon dog of American literature, the foul owl with the death growl, the white night of the far right, and the slick trick with the donkey dick. My books are written in blood, seminal fluid and napalm. Etcetera. This is his ‘demon dog’ persona, adopted many years before as a way of overcoming his native insecurities. At school, Ellroy adopted a persona whose main shtick was expressing a fondness for far-right politics He is quoted in this biography as saying that this persona is ‘about 3 per cent’ of who he is. I would say, and I choose the adjective carefully, this is a conservative estimate.

The Amazon is a notoriously difficult part of the world to write about – and I’ve tried. Travelling the river’s slow length, it can be hard to make sense of any changes beneath the forest canopy or to link its disparate communities. The Brazilian writer Eliane Brum succeeds triumphantly. Acclaimed for her previous ‘despatches from Brazil’, appealingly titled The Collector of Leftover Souls, she moved from São Paulo, one of the largest cities of the Americas, to the isolated Xingu tributary to embed herself completely. Or, as she might put it, to lose herself. When asked their age, tribal people just make up a number to be helpful – and then repeatedly change it As a journalist, she is used to asking people their age.