Pleasure is not a word one associates with Margaret Atwood, especially in her recent novels, where she has assumed the mantle of prophet of ecological doom.

From the opening sentence of this collection of nine short stories, however, one is gripped, not only by the subjects she addresses, but the manner of their telling. This is Atwood of yore, who brought us The Edible Woman and Cat's Eye, and the hippie cast of The Robber Bride - who, incidentally, we meet again here, several decades hence, including one who is dead.

It is not that the younger Atwood was any less serious than she later became in her Oryx And Crake trilogy, in which the world is in meltdown, but that her playful side was formerly allowed freer rein. And here it is again, the sharp-clawed, gimlet-eyed, takes-no-prisoners Atwood whose humour is wickedly enjoyable, so long as one is not its butt. A man's straggling goatee is described as "like the underside of a centipede". A lover starts his wooing at his girlfriend's feet, "kissing his way up her like a slug on a lettuce". A woman's brother must intervene when she applies make-up: "He has to keep reminding her not to halt the sparkly bronze procedure halfway down her neck: otherwise her head will look sewed on."

But there is beauty in this writing, as well as harsh observational gems, and Atwood creates atmosphere with loving care, from the first sentence of the first story: "The freezing rain sifts down, handfuls of shining rice thrown by some unseen celebrant."

It is winter in this opener, Alphinland, as it is in the two stories that follow, all three interlinked by character and by date. Nor is the season accidentally chosen. Constance, the newly widowed novelist we first meet in this tale, is elderly, though her memory is sharp. She, like so many of the figures in this book, is approaching her last years, when the business of surviving grows tiresomely demanding. Nevertheless, her increasing frailty does not diminish Constance's inner life, or the creative voice that made her name, and that of others we meet here.

Alphinland is the world Constance invented as a young writer. Now viewed as "the grandmother of 20th-century world-building fantasy", she is mirrored in another story by lonely Jack Dace, who as a penniless student created a gothic horror story - The Dead Hand Loves You - that he's lived off ever since. While his style is now too tame for modern tastes, Constance's work remains evergreen, a perpetual taunt to those who originally mocked her, a group that possibly includes her straying but beloved late husband.

Atwood brings a relish to her depiction of the life of novelists and poets whose careers began half a century ago. Her barbs for the pretensions and sexism of male literati are poker-hot, but more interesting than these glimpses of a palaeolithic age is her portrait of writers as a species, whether failed, or obscure, or flourishing, and the way she places them and their art in cultural context.

There is something simultaneously heartening and chilling in her sweep. At the same time as showing that even if the body is diminished the person inside has barely changed, Atwood adroitly depicts the dilemmas and dissatisfactions and the still troublesome anxieties and regrets that dog the old.

Some of the stories in Stone Mattress are jeux d'esprit, such as the murder committed on an Arctic cruise ship in the title story. All are droll if not outright funny, albeit the laughter is black. And while her insights are acute, and even poignant, Atwood does not succumb to sentimentality, and never less so than in her alarming finale, Torch The Dusties.

Set in an expensive care home, it pits disaffected youth against the generation it deems culpable for the world's spiralling woes.

If the heedless and greedy who have had their day won't stand aside voluntarily, then they will have to be forced. What follows is an oddly affecting tale.

By its end, one appreciates that Atwood is capable of combining fantasy and horror and realism in this, and other of her works, until the seams are lost and one thing melts into another, with drily comic - and sometimes tragic - effect.