A Place for Mean Instincts : THE ROBBER BRIDE, <i> By Margaret Atwood (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday: $24; 466 pp.)</i>

Tony is a diamond. She is set, along with three considerably inferior stones, in an excess of ordinary fictional scrollwork. But Tony glitters.

She is one of three woman friends pitted against a woman enemy in what by now should be called, not a new novel by Margaret Atwood but simply: a new Atwood. As one would say: a new Updike or a new Roth or, years ago, a new Wodehouse or, a century ago, a new Trollope. It is not just an author we visit but a country.

In “The Robber Bride” we meet women hurting women--very competently, particularly when mothers or rivals do the hurting. We meet women helping women--not very competently, because of damage or inhibition. Behind it all, of course, it is the male world that inflicts major pain, but Atwood’s message is that men are like the weather--a few of them nice, most of them dangerous--and that blaming them is a waste of time. It is up to women to be strong enough to enjoy them or take adequate measures against them. Women’s weakness lies in their scruples; their failure to make a place for their own mean and ungraceful instincts alongside the pretty ones. For their Old Eve, in other words.

So Atwood cheerfully makes a place on their behalf. Her books move by anger, wit and here and there a phrase that blows the skirts over our ears, as if we were walking through a fun-house and had stepped over an air-jet. (Atwood imparts her fiery and chilly sense of womanhood so thoroughly that even a male reader feels he is wearing a skirt.)

Tony, a scholar; Charis, an aging flower-child, and Roz, a neurotically ebullient business executive, are the three-woman support system in “The Robber Bride.” They are linked by the injuries they hold in common; their common injurer is Zenia, a compulsive swindler and inveterate marauder. She has stolen the trio’s men one by one, destroyed two of them and returned the third in damaged condition. He moans in his sleep and is no longer able to take out the garbage. The three victims are hampered to different degrees by their different styles of “niceness”; the villainess is pure unhampered evil but she has the courage of her nature. Two of the men are scoundrels, the third a more or less domesticated slug, and none of them has any importance. Atwood country.

It is rather poor Atwood country, flat and sometimes marshy. The road that leads through it winds at excessive length to take in a great deal of uninteresting scenery. It could have cut across and reached the same destination much faster. The story of Tony, Charis and Roz, and how they submit to and finally rise up against their vampire, driving an all but literal stake through her heart, is essentially a fable; fierce, and faintly surreal. Zenia, who burrows into the vulnerability of her victims by recounting a different set of woes to each, and then making off with the family jewels--in both senses of the expression--is agile and stylized. Deliberately, she is without human dimensions.

This works for an allegory’s sprint, but Atwood has harnessed the sprint to a long plod. The allegory submerges in the massive psychological realism with which the stories of the three victims are recounted. They are three-dimensional, while Zenia is two-dimensional. Her airy cartoon wickedness loses its flair from having to hang around so long while the others develop themselves. At times Atwood herself seems to be dutifully hanging around to get the job done.

Charis, abandoned by her mad mother, raised by a lusty grandmother and then put in the care of an aunt, and an uncle who rapes her regularly, is written as reams of case-history. She splits herself with an alter ego named Karen, sees other people’s auras, grows up to be a hippie and then a middle-aged hippie, works in a New Age store, avoids meat and animal fat but raises chickens to feed a vile waif she has taken in. He is a piggy American who has fled to Canada during the Vietnam War and eventually goes off with Zenia. Charis and her story drag low-spiritedly on.

Roz runs the business she has inherited from her father with energy and talent, but she never loses her poor-little-rich-girl quality. She is overweight, awkward, has been married for her money--Zenia gets the husband and some of the money--and leaks love and generosity as a balloon leaks air, steadily losing altitude. She is livelier than Charis and has her memorable moments, but for long stretches her story is perilously like a television serial.

Fortunately, there is Tony. She was her friends’ mascot at college. Tiny, with an elf-cut and oversized glasses, she resembled “a street urchin crossed with a newly hatched bird.” She has no boyfriends until she takes over a large musicologist whom Zenia discards, repossesses, discards once more and squeezes dry. She studies assiduously, determined to make an academic career. And she succeeds despite the oddity of her subject: war, or as she sometimes puts it “raw.”

Reversing words, phrases, songs is partly her vice and entertainment. She is in demand to sing “Oh My Darling Clementine” backward. It sounds like a Welsh hymn: “Enitnemelc Gnilrad Ym Ho.” But it is more than that. Her childhood pain--her mother absconded, her father killed himself--plus being forced, left-handed, to write with her right hand, has tied a great primal knot. Instead of case histories, as with Charis and Roz, it comes out as proto-Welsh. Not only more entertaining but, for us, more instructive. “It’s her seam where she’s sewn together when she could split apart,” Atwood writes in one grave line that does the work of 50 pages.

Women must be warriors. Atwood puts it not in a message but in a wacky, entirely serious portrait. Tony visits history’s battlefields. She re-fights famous battles on a sand-covered table in her basement, using grains and spices for the different armies: the Germans are cloves, the Saracens, green peppercorns. She varies the tactics, envisaging hypothetical outcomes, and writes books on the results. She studies generally neglected topics such as mud, boots and fly-openings. A soldier who has to struggle for 10 minutes with his fly buttons, in freezing weather and under sniper fire, is at a serious disadvantage. How do zippers affect battles? Drawstrings? Kilts? There will be a chapter on “Inept Military Couture.”

Feminist academics hate her specialty. Male academics get nervous. Fortunately she is small. Why a wind could blow her away, one professorial mastodon chortles. “Many have blown,” Atwood laconically notes. There is some long slogging to get to Tony. It’s not quite accurate to say that she makes the trip worthwhile--all in all, this is on of Atwood’s weaker books--but she certainly improves it.