Burning Questions

Now in her eighties, Margaret Atwood is at a stage in her career when she is treated as something of a prophetess by the general public and the media alike. And not without reason. The totalitarian society founded on religious fundamentalism and the control of women’s bodies described in her now-cult The Handmaid’s Tale (1984) was adapted for TV the year Donald Trump was elected president, at which point it felt a little too close to the mark; she started work on her novel Oryx and Crake, set in a postapocalyptic world devastated by a virus, in 2001 – it came out during the Sars-epidemic in 2003; and in the year leading up to the 2008 financial crash, she was preparing the lecture series that would be published that November as Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. All of which might explain why, in this engaging though unequal selection of some 60 essays, lectures, obituaries and speeches written over the past two decades, she is often asked by a variety of universities and associations to offer responses to some of life’s more open-ended questions, such as ‘How to change the world?’ or ‘What will happen next?’. As you’d expect of someone whose reflection is powered by constant interrogation of the world around her, most of the more geniuinely ‘burning’ ones are posed by the author herself: why have citizens in many Western countries been willing to surrender their freedoms without protest? Are we in debt to anyone or anything as a result of the bare fact of our existence? Why are women so scary to men? What kinds of stories can writers tell about our increasingly desperate situation?

Atwood returns cyclically (and somewhat repetitively, given that this is an edited selection of texts) to her own hobby horses: the advancement of women’s rights, freedom and totalitarianism, ecology and the climate crisis, the role of the arts in society and the creative act of writing. This last is the subject on which she’s at her most engaging: Atwood is a brilliant storyteller even when she’s not writing fiction, at once witty and accessible, with a particular talent for turning the particular into the universal. People remember stories better than facts, she explains, and so she paints her arguments in metaphors, classical myths and personal anecdotes. ‘Show. Don’t state’, she advises would-be writers in one of her lectures; when reflecting on humankind’s exploitative relationship with nature in general and forests in particular, she draws on everything from Greek mythology to Charles Perrault’s fairytales to the works of Shakespeare to illustrate our ancient ambivalence towards the woods. In a lecture titled ‘Scientific Romancing’ that probes the intersection of science and fiction, and the difference between speculative and science fiction, she calls on Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell (‘the majority of dystopias have been written by men’, she points out); a selection of reviews and obituaries, meanwhile, sees Atwood pay tribute to the other writers who have influenced her (Karen Blixen, Franz Kafka, Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, Alice Munro) as well as to environmentalist Rachel Carson.

If Atwood reveals herself in these pieces as an insightful critic and reader of this long lineage of storytellers including some of her contemporaries, this reviewer would have loved to see the prophetess’s take on more recent and diverse literary references (here she rarely turns her attention to authors based outside the West or under her age). Perhaps that’s because, as many of her burning questions suggest, Atwood’s eyes are locked on the future (of freedom, of the environment, of the arts) rather than on the dismal present. ‘As once solid certainties crumble,’ she writes, ‘it may be enough to cultivate your artistic garden – to do what you can for as long as you can do it; to create alternate worlds that offer both temporary escapes and moments of insight; to open windows in the given world that allow us to see outside it.’ Therein, Atwood suggests, lies the power of fiction. Louise Darblay