Curate’s egg by Atwood

FRANCES WILSON

Old Babes in the Wood

20th-century suburban mother is, she suspects, a witch, is similarly composed of flat sentences and tired jokes, as if the idea itself were enough.

they’re only a touch away. Is that better, or worse?’

When Tig is dying, Nell holds onto him while he sleeps.

By Margaret Atwood Chatto

& Windus £22

These 15 stories by Margaret Atwood are a mixed bag.

The first three and the last four feature an elderly couple called Tig and Nell. They are based, I imagine, on Atwood herself (now aged 83) and her husband, Graham Gibson, who died in 2019. The eight stories that form the book’s core explore a variety of themes, some fantastical and futuristic.

There is an interview between the author and George Orwell, who speaks through a medium in a séance. There’s a version of Patient Griselda, as told by an alien. In one tale, the soul of a snail translates into the body of a bank clerk, and in another, two best friends squabble over their memories of the past.

The degeneration of language is a recurring subject, with Atwood’s observations being much the same as those of the rest of us.

‘Did she just use totally as a modifier?’ asks a retired university lecturer in Airborne: A Symposium

In each case, an amusing idea has been only half-executed, leaving us with something undernourished and slight.

The Orwell interview, in particular, is a missed opportunity. ‘You’re a female colonial, I understand from the voice?’ Orwell says to Atwood.

His own voice, together with the consumptive cough, comes in and out of tune, Atwood says, like a radio finding its wavelength.

Orwell tells her about the world as it was before his death in 1950 –‘revolutions, dictatorships, wars’ – and Atwood fills him in on what’s happened since.

‘The internet?’ he asks. ‘Is that some kind of political secret society?’

After mocking his limitations (‘I guess you didn’t read women much’) and admitting that she had initially missed the allegory in Animal Farm, Atwood says, ‘There’s one more thing I’d like to tell you about. It’s a book called Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit.’

It is unlikely that Orwell, campaigner for the kind of plain English that the working man might enjoy, would much care for the self-indulgence of Orwell’s Roses, a pretentious meditation on what Orwell means to Solnit and what roses mean to Orwell. But hey ho.

My Evil Mother, about a girl whose

The Tig and Nell stories, on the other hand, are subtle and poignant, written in grief and from the heart. Nothing untoward happens in them; almost nothing happens in them at all, in fact, and this is their beauty.

Atwood’s subject here is memory, loss and the slowing down of the clock. Tig has died and Nell, heartbroken, remembers the daily pleasure of his companionship.

In First Aid, she remembers coming home to find the front door open and blood on the steps of the house:

‘That was some time ago. Early autumn, as she recalls, a year in the later 1980s. There were personal computers then, of a lumbering kind. And printers: the paper for them came with the pages joined together at the top and bottom, and had holes along the sides, in perforated strips, that you could tear off.’

Tig, having cut himself while chopping a carrot, is at the hospital having his wound stitched up. Nell then recalls a first-aid class they attended, and a variety of life-threatening experiences.

The drama of First Aid is contained in the movement between the solid, recognisable past – ‘How much waiting we used to do, she thinks. Waiting without knowing’ – and the present, where ‘space-time is denser; it’s crowded; you can barely move because the air is so packed with this and that’.

Switching between the 20th century and the 21st, Atwood catches the cataclysmic differences between the eras: ‘You can’t get away from people: they’re in touch; they’re touching;

‘Don’t go, don’t go,’ she whispers.

When he is dead she reflects that ‘It’s an optical illusion, the retreating figure dwindling, growing smaller and smaller and then disappearing in the distance. Those retreating stay the same size. They aren’t really diminished. They aren’t really gone.’

If the entire book were composed of Tig and Nell stories, Old Babes in the Wood would stay in the mind as something whole, lovely and fully achieved rather than like, well, a radio programme coming into and out of focus.

Himmler’s hero doctor

DR THEODORE DALRYMPLE The Man with Miraculous Hands

By Joseph Kessel Elliott & Thompson £20

When I told people that one of my first patients in prison was a man who had killed and dismembered three children and who now complained of a slight cough, they would ask how I could treat such a man.

It was the same question, in essence, as lawyers are asked about their defence of those whom they suspect to be guilty of the awful crime of which they have been accused.

But what of treating a man such as Heinrich Himmler, guilty not of individual crimes but of unprecedented mass murder as national policy? To treat him medically was the fate of Felix Kersten (1898-1960), an alternative practitioner and masseur trained in Eastern methods who was the only person who could relieve the Reichsführer’s intermittent bouts of excruciating abdominal pain.

Opposed to Nazism, Kersten used Himmler’s dependence on him to help reprieve the lives of many prisoners of the Gestapo, and eventually saved thousands from extermination.

‘We must not tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories about my new clothes’

Joseph Kessel – the French journalist, novelist, travel writer, aviator and adventurer who, like Kersten, was born in 1898 and lived some of his early life in the Russian Empire – published this account of Kersten’s life after he had become Himmler’s medical adviser and confidant. He based it entirely on

Kersten’s own account, and the result is as racy as any spy novel.

First published in French in 1960 with a preface by Hugh Trevor-Roper, it conveys very graphically the jockeying for power among the Nazi elite while they were complicit in some of the worst crimes in the far-from-spotless history of humanity.

Kersten had a very large and fashionable practice both in the Netherlands, where he treated Prince Hendrik, and in Germany, before he became entangled with Himmler. He was so successful that he accumulated a collection of Dutch and Flemish masters.

According to his own account, he was utterly apolitical before then, concentrating entirely on his lucrative medical activities, scarcely even noticing the advent of the Nazis. Whether this is plausible – whether any intelligent person could not notice the radical change that came over Germany in 1933 – is a question that Kessel did not ask, let alone answer. It would have rather spoiled the straightforwardness of his narrative.

Kersten was introduced to Himmler in 1939, before the outbreak of war, by a German industrialist whom he had successfully treated and who feared the nationalisation of his company. In a sense, Kersten never looked back: Himmler confided in him as in no one else.

The portrait of Himmler that emerges is that of a type with whom we have become, alas, all too familiar. Himmler was a touchy and self-doubting but arrogant and ambitious mediocrity. His drive to power was all-consuming in the attempt to overcome his own obvious defects and inferiority. At the same time as seeking power, he was to be the abject slave of someone or something more powerful than himself – in this case, of course, Hitler.

It is striking how so many of the top Nazis – Himmler, Goebbels, Hitler himself – promoted the ideal of Apollonian brutishness when they themselves were such physical weeds.

Kessel, who was himself treated by Kersten after the war, accepts Kersten’s account of his achievements and activities rather uncritically.

Kersten (who published his own memoirs in 1947) claimed he had averted the deportation by Himmler of the entire Dutch population to Poland. He did this by telling Himmler this additional burden to his already crushing duties rendered his abdominal crises impossible to treat, even by himself. The only solution was to abandon the plans for deportation until victory was achieved.

According to later research, no such plan actually existed. And Kersten, brave and admirable as he undoubtedly was, did not resist the temptation to magnify his own achievements.

The book is dated in another way. Surely, no one would now write about Himmler’s treatment without wondering what his actual diagnosis was. Irritable bowel? Peptic ulceration? On this matter, Kessel is silent. The details of the illness are frustratingly skimpy.

There seems little doubt, however, that whatever it was, there was a strong psychological component to it. Were the miraculous hands that soothed away Himmler’s pain the hands of the placebo effect wielded by a man with a most reassuring manner?

There are revelations in the book that, if true, are important. Kersten claimed to have seen a report proving that Hitler suffered from tertiary syphilis. This is possible but not probable.

And Kersten reports that Himmler told him the Final Solution was ordered by Hitler himself and that he had a written document signed by Hitler to prove it. This, if it existed, has never been found.

Whatever the historical exactitude of the book, it is a wonderful read, and the portrait of Himmler has the ring of ghastly truth.

Dr Theodore Dalrymple is The Oldie’s doctor