Fantasia with dark undertones
Margaret Atwood talks about her graphic novel series Angel Catbird and raises hopes of a Handmaid sequel
From her perch in Toronto, author Margaret Atwood has been observing the American political landscape with a cat’s watchful eye. Along with George Orwell’s 1984, Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale recently returned to the Amazon bestseller lists.
The Hulu TV version of the novel, premièring in April, has no doubt spurred interest, but it’s also a response to Donald Trump’s America, where Gilead, Atwood’s imagined theocracy in which women are forced into bearing children, seems more possible than ever.
On Thursday, Atwood was presented an honorary award for lifetime achievement at the the U.S. National Book Critics Circle awards. At the awards gala, she wryly expressed gratitude that she was permitted to enter the U.S. from her native Canada, a reference to Trump’s policies on immigration and border control.
She urged the writers and critics in the room to press on with their work and noted that in many countries, what they were doing would be illegal. “I hope there will be fewer such places,” she added, “but I’m not holding my breath.”
We recently talked about her graphic novel series Angel Catbird, which debuted in 2016 to sparkling acclaim. Volume 2 arrived on Valentine’s Day, and Volume 3 comes out in July.
Since she’s cranking out sequels, it’s too tempting to ask: Is she thinking of a followup to The Handmaid’s Tale?
“To tell you the truth, yes. But I don’t know whether that will happen or not. I’ve certainly been thinking about it,” she says, declining to reveal more. The political climate, Atwood wryly notes, “changes day by day — you never know what wondrous surprise will be sprung on you.”
For today, though, she has set herself a far more enjoyable task: To figure out what kind of sound Angel Catbird, the hybrid cat-owlhuman at the centre of her graphic novels, would make for an upcoming audiobook that will be performed like a ’40s radio play. “Would he make a whoo-meow or a meow-whoo?” she asks, trying out each with her soft voice before breaking into raspy laughter.
For all her reputation as a serious author of dystopian drama, Atwood is quick to laugh. She also occasionally imitates a know-it-all elderly type in a high voice so jarring that I thought another person had broken into our phone line. The voice — “excuse me, dear, I’m old enough to remember all this” — mostly comes out when we’re talking about political history.
At 77, Atwood has witnessed many iterations, and they have always banged around in her imagination.
When she was a little girl, Atwood drew cat-people holding balloons, which she’d only seen in books. Those same dream animals and their forbidden worlds show up in Angel Catbird.
Illustrated by artist Johnnie Christmas and colourist Tamra Bonvillain, Angel Catbird is a fantasia firmly rooted in Atwood’s playful side, though not without its bleak undertones. Volume 2 follows the same cast of shape-shifting characters, including Strig Feleedus, a genetic engineer hybridized with his pet cat and a preying owl in a chemical spillcum-car accident. He’s battling his villainous lab boss, a rathuman hell-bent on wiping out all other species, especially the cathumans whom Angel Catbird aligns with, mostly to spend time with fellow scientist Cate Leone.
Not all of Cate’s friends welcome him with open paws — put off by his owlish tendencies, some call him a freak. In our era of transphobia and white nationalism, Angel Catbird is a clever metaphor for people’s discomfort with those who don’t fit into the accepted binaries. You haven’t seen identity struggles until you’ve seen a man with talons, cat eyes and a set of humongous wings convince himself not to eat a fellow bird for supper.
Atwood didn’t purposely write characters who could be read as transgender or biracial, but she sees them as being part of a long legacy of transformation. “People in comics have always been pretty malleable,” she said. “We’re in the land of saints and gods here, and the saints and gods, particularly the gods, have always been notorious shapeshifters.”
She brings up Captain Marvel, who transforms from little boy Billy Batson with the call of Shazam, derived from the mythical figures Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles and Mercury.
Comics may seem like a 20th century invention, but “stories beget other stories,” says Atwood. “Mine is an homage to the comics of the late ’40s — but where did that style come from itself? The roots of these stories go very deep.”
Though Atwood acknowledges that recent graphic novels such as Maus and Persepolis made it “safe” for novelists to “act out their sacred fantasies,” Atwood’s interest in comics isn’t a passing fancy. She’s as fluent in Wonder Woman’s original mission (fighting Nazis) and the Comics Code Authority, a self-regulating body established by comic-book publishers in 1954, as any fairy tale from Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen, to name two wells she’s drawn from in her fiction.
She doesn’t, however, let the weight of history keep her away from a tasty cat or rat pun, of which there are many in Angel Catbird. The rat-army is called the Murines (rats are part of the superfamily Muroidea), there’s a Queen Neferkitti, and Atwood’s particularly proud of the vampiric Count Catula, an undead cat with bat and human attributes and several cat-wives.
In one of its wonderfully campy scenes, Atheen-owl (half owl, half woman) and Cate get into a fight over Angel Catbird’s affections. Both women proudly own up to being “catty” in a moment that asks why we don’t let women claim their full range of behaviour. “If you’re going to pretend that [women are] some angelic species at heart, then you are exempting them from being human. You’re setting the bar impossibly high; everyone has to behave well all the time. In what world do men have to behave well all the time?”
Speaking of men behaving badly, Atwood has threaded environmental and animal welfare messages throughout Angel Catbird to counteract what she sees as a frightening disregard for our planetary well-being.
Clean water and algae-rich oceans, for instance, “ought to be commonly shared concerns that cross party lines. There’s something really wrong if you think not poisoning kids is a liberal concern.”
As she was in the era of writing The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood is also concerned about reproductive rights, though she thinks the battle is more complex than environmentalism. “Whenever you have the choice between two things [forced childbirth or abortion rights], neither of which are good, it’s always going to be difficult.” Forced childbirth, as required in Gilead, “has never worked out well,” Atwood says, citing Romania’s former Decree 770 which forbade abortion for nearly all women.