|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Margaret Atwood’s new novel is another dystopian tale of environmental catastrophe, but in person she is far from gloomy, writes Arifa Akbar
Its publication is marked by a series of "musical" book readings at which Atwood will read from the book’s "green hymns", and is accompanied by local musicians and environmentally-friendly props made from re-usable Sainsbury’s bags and bric-`E0-brac reclaimed from rubbish dumps. The proceeds are dedicated to bird organisations, including the RSPB, of which Atwood is a passionate supporter. The novel is her latest addition to an oeuvre that has spanned five decades of poetry, prize-winning fiction, and critical tomes. It describes the fall-out of an immense natural disaster that leaves few human survivors and a herd of genetically spliced animals roaming in the atrophied wilderness. The tour is an inspired idea, but I suggest, surely a daunting undertaking for a writer who is a stone’s throw away from turning 70? Atwood appears impervious to the expectations — and gravitational wear and tear — associated with her age. When asked about the disappearance of the elderly in popular culture, she quips: "Old people disappear from society because they keel over. Look at Diana Athill, my first editor. She’s 92 and carrying on... I always have fun with whatever I do. There’s too much around that’s not fun. People should live life as joyfully as possible," she says. Even so, there is the odd twinge of apprehension. "It was never supposed to be such a big tour but things kept getting added on." Her travels began last month at the Edinburgh Book Festival and will end in Sudbury, Ontario, the day before her birthday (18 November) – "if I survive it till the end". It is not just the tour but also her latest book that emerged as a response to popular demand. After finishing her novel Oryx and Crake in 2003, she was asked so many times what happened next that Atwood — who once said of writers that "all must commit acts of larceny, or else of reclamation" — raided her own imagined world for inspiration. But this new nightmarish vision of a post-diluvian wasteland littered with genetically engineered flora and fauna and a refuse of characters from an environmental sect is only mildly familiar. Minor characters from Oryx and Crake appear, but in central roles. "It’s not a sequel, nor a prequel, but a ‘simultan-eul’," she explains. It is perhaps ironic, then that this latest work ends with its very own cliffhanger. Does this mean the imminent creation of a third parallel universe? Unlikely, although Atwood does hint at a desire to revisit her most popularly acclaimed work, The Handmaid’s Tale. "You could tell The Handmaid’s Tale from a male point of view. People have mistakenly felt that the women are oppressed, but power tends to organise itself in a pyramid. I could pick a male narrator from somewhere in that pyramid. It would be interesting." Atwood came to prominence in the 1969 with her first novel, The Edible Woman, written while she was living in Edmonton, Alberta. Early reviewers classed it as a feminist tract, even though she was cut off from the American feminist movement in New York at the time. Her allegiance to that particular brand of political feminism remains as distant now as it was then. "The Edible Woman came out just at that time when the movement was rolling out. Those who had heard of it reviewed the book as feminist... but my novel was not informed by it." Her definition of feminism appears to focus on more humanistic concerns, and her idea of women as "equal but different" has chimed more with the French feminist philosophers of the 1970s who celebrate difference. Atwood’s fiction, celebrated for its rich imagination, is rooted in real-world topography. Just as the totalitarian theocracy in The Handmaid’s Tale was written after a trip to Kabul in 1978 and also with Iran’s authoritarian regime in mind, The Year of the Flood is so firmly based on geography that "I could show you (its location) on a map," says Atwood. This real-world element provides grist for Atwood’s argument that she is creating "speculative fiction" rather than science fiction because it falls within the realms of possibility. "I’m not describing our world, but we are going in that direction... it’s a future whose beginnings are already with us." So is this a cautionary tale about science? Far from being disdainful of it, Atwood appears fully plugged into the modern world of whizz-bang technology: she blogs, tweets, and, not so long ago, she devised the LongPen (which allows writers to sign their novels digitally). "This is not mad scientist stuff. It’s not Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Science is a tool, like a hammer. You can use it for good or ill, to build a house or to murder your neighbour. Some of the biotechnology in the book is quite handy. It’s not science you have to look at but the human beings that use it." Her concern for the environment has only entered her literature in the past few years but it has always been there in the backdrop of her life and early years. . Nature, in The Year of the Flood, is described in quasi-scriptural terms; the environmental group is called God’s Gardeners, and their leaders named Adam and Eve; the hymns bear strong Christian overtones; the flood and its aftermath — on which the entire story hinges — exploits the familiar trope of Noah’s ark; and the "Garden" is described as an oasis, akin to a paradise. When Toby — one of the narrators — first sees it: "She gazed around it in wonder: it was so beautiful, with plants and flowers of many kinds she’d never seen before. "There were vivid butterflies: from nearby came the vibration of bees. Each petal and leaf was fully alive, shining with awareness of her... It was as if a large, benevolent hand had reached down and picked her up, and was holding her safe. She frequently heard Adam One speak of ‘being flooded with the Light of God’s creation’, and without knowing it yet that was how she felt." Atwood says she set out, not to celebrate Christianity, but to extract the pantheistic elements from early Christian texts and other religions; Jesus features as a proto-environmentalist, and the Buddha turns up, too. — By arrangement with The Independent
|
Margaret
Atwood’s new novel, The Year of the Flood features a dystopia
in which science has had cataclysmic consequences on the environment,
and it represents Atwood’s call on "greenies" to mobilise.