SOURCE: "Dying Falls," in London Review of Books, Vol. 9, No. 14, July 23, 1987, pp. 24, 26.

In the following excerpt, Lanchester provides a mixed assessment of the short story collection Bluebeard's Egg.

[The endings of Margaret Atwood's fiction] tend to leave things slightly in the air, and to present themselves to the reader for interpretation. The dystopian fantasy of The Handmaid's Tale was followed by a framing fiction—of the kind that is more usually put in front of a narrative—which pretended that what we had just read had been the material presented at an academic conference, centuries after the events depicted. The academic ended with a question: 'Are there any questions?' Many of the stories in Bluebeard's Egg implicitly ask the same thing.

The material treated in Bluebeard's Egg is largely conventional, consisting as it does of relationships of one kind or another (parents in the stories which begin...