Virago £17.99 pp413

Every so often in Margaret Atwood’s “grab-bag of occasional pieces” there’s a cameo of what it was like to be a writer in the Canada of 40 years ago (an era when Canadian novels usually languished in bookshops’ “Canadiana” sections alongside works such as 101 Things to Do with Maple Sugar). On a reading tour she tugs behind her, on a sledge, suitcases packed with copies of her books since it’s improbable they ’ll be on sale locally. Her first book signing — for The Edible Woman (1969) — is located in the men’s sock and underwear department of a large store. When she affronts the boorish host of a television talk show by taking her work seriously, “in place of the interview they ran a feature on green noodles”.

Some of the most enthralling pieces in Curious Pursuits recount how and why Atwood surmounted such discouragements. For admirers of her books, it is a goldmine. There are fascinating essays on the genesis of her two exercises in what she calls “speculative fiction”: her political horror-forecast, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), and her matching ecological horror-forecast, Oryx and Crake (2003). Equally engrossing is an account of her excursion into the opposite kind of fiction, historical re-creation, with her version of a gruesome real-life 19th-century murder case, Alias Grace (1996).

It’s intriguing to learn that, behind what is arguably the most accomplished and exciting body of fiction of the last quarter century, lies a welter of deferrals and false starts. Cat’s Eye (1988) takes years to get right, as does The Blind Assassin (2000). Qualms about its seeming too outlandish hold her back from beginning The Handmaid’s Tale until, in the iconic dystopian year of 1984, a visit to West Berlin and travels in Eastern Europe coalesce with memories of a stay in Kabul and reflections on the Iranian revolution to impel her into writing it. Unsurprisingly, in view of the numerous revisions of her novels itemised here, she believes that “The waste-basket has evolved for a reason. Think of it as the altar of the Muse Oblivion, to whom you sacrifice your botched first drafts, the tokens of your human imperfection. She is the tenth Muse, the one without whom none of the others can function.”

Besides its insights into her own writing processes, Curious Pursuits brims with generous, acute commentary on other authors. There are beautifully gauged obituary tributes to friends such as Carol Shields. Handsomely memorialising writers who have meant much to her, Atwood brings them vividly back to life by the kind of animating physical detail that always energises her fiction: Angela Carter with “her high, quizzical, oddly childlike voice”, Mordecai Richler with “his sad bloodhound’s gaze fixed on the bogusness of the passing scene”. Appreciative reviews showcase the talents of writers from John Updike to Ursula K Le Guin. Harking further back, she brings zestful astuteness to re-appraisals of Victorian exotica such as Rider Haggard’s She or H G Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau.

Culturally, Curious Pursuits roams widely: from an Inuit film to Dashiell Hammett and a cartoon-strip witch called Broom Hilda. Never averse to meandering, the lectures it re-prints digress irrepressibly to take in topics such as femmes fatales through the ages or orphans in 19th- and 20th-century literature. Geographically, too, stretching from Afghanistan in 1978 to the Arctic in 2004, the range is broad.

Among occasional glimpses of Atwood’s personal life is a memoir of her aunts. With two of them, when a young writer, she paid a visit to a reclusive novelist, Ernest Buckler (puzzlingly given to frequent poppings-out to the kitchen during their call). Afterwards one aunt compliments Atwood: “That was something! He said you had a teeming brain!” Deflatingly, the other observes that (the reason for the recurrent nippings into the kitchen) the man was “oiled”. Swirling with intelligence and imaginative flair, this rich, witty, evocative, sharp and stimulating miscellany shows that, drunk or sober, he was absolutely right.

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