Cover Story: Old myths, new truths

Spun from low-status material on the margins of classical culture, The Penelopiad creates a form all its own. As she works from the Odyssey and other traditional stories, Atwood resurrects the long-suffering wife of Odysseus " and the 12 young 'maids' (that is, slaves) so bafflingly hanged when the hero returned to Ithaca after his long adventures in the wake of the Trojan wars. It sounds, in the abstract, rather like the sort of low-temperature, left- handed exercise with which garlanded authors may sometimes while away the time as a bigger idea comes slowly to the boil. Not with Atwood, who will kill a fledgling work off rather than nurture a misbegotten book.

Indeed, she made two false starts on other legendary yarns before settling on Penelope " one a Native American story, the other the Norse myth about the creation of humanity out of two logs of wood ('But I couldn't get the logs of wood animated!'). Then, at long last, 'out of my unconscious, where I keep so many things, there appeared in particular the hanged maids, who have always bothered me about the Odyssey'.

Atwood's Penelopiad has its Pinter-like side: the fraught court of Ithaca, its wily king absent, heavy with secrets and silences and lies. And it has its wild struggle for survival, too. Penelope, the woman alone, learns to cope with the desertion of the alpha-male hunter-warriors for Troy and then for their cross-Mediterranean escapades with seductive sirens and scary giants. Meanwhile, the pesky suitors " 100 or more " gather to violate her maids, to eat her out of goats and pigs, and to pressure her into an enslaving match.

Much of Atwood's most powerful fiction " think of The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, Cat's Eye or The Blind Assassin " brings to the fore female transgressors of demonic, or heroic, zest and heft. The theme of good girls versus bad women bubbles like a stream of mischief through the invigorating collection of essays and articles, Curious Pursuits, which Virago published earlier this year. 'Female bad characters can act as keys to doors we need to open,' argued Atwood's celebration of 'Spotty-Handed Villainesses' in 1993, 'and as mirrors in which in which we can see more than just a pretty face... Such characters can pose the question of responsibility, because if you want power you have to accept responsibility.' An earlier essay on 'The Curse of Eve' runs: 'I myself have never known an angel, a harpy, a witch or an earth mother. I've known a number of real women, not all of whom have been nicer or more noble or more long-suffering or less righteous and pompous than men.'

Yet now the high priestess of strong wrongdoing picks patient Penelope, that ancient role-model of docile wifely virtue. As Atwood admits, Penelope has been 'in general somewhat neglected for the very simple reason that in the Odyssey she does four things: weaving, waiting, C weeping " and she does sleeping. You can't get around the fact that she spends a great deal of time in the Odyssey crying: to show how much she cares that Odysseus isn't there, how beleaguered she feels, and how lost and alone and unhappy she is.'