“I’m the good sage on high of the mountain,” Margaret Atwood says with a smile, on a video name from her dwelling in Toronto. “In case you’ve lived to a sure age individuals assume one thing as a result of they haven’t obtained there but.”
At 84, most writers might be forgiven for taking it straightforward, however particularly Atwood, after a tumultuous few years that have seen The Handmaid’s Story change into a success TV sequence; the publication of its long-awaited sequel The Testaments, joint winner of the Booker prize in 2019; and the demise of her companion of practically 50 years, novelist Graeme Gibson. He died of a stroke two days after the UK launch of the novel, and Atwood, with typical grit, carried on with the tour.
Since turning 80 she has printed a guide of poems, Dearly, many in reminiscence of Gibson; a doorstopper quantity of nonfiction, Burning Questions; and a group of quick tales, Outdated Babes within the Wooden – sustaining her common of writing a guide a yr for greater than 60 years. To not point out a gentle circulate of articles and an brisk Substack. Nowadays she will hardly exit in public with out requests for selfies. “The most perilous location is the ladies’s washroom,” she confides.
On the finish of final yr, Atwood had a brand new pacemaker fitted, a process she faucet danced via, posting a video of herself doing a post-op routine to Singin’ within the Rain in a hospital robe. Her coronary heart situation is progressive – “Now there’s a cute use of the phrase ‘progressive’ for ya!” she writes on her Substack – however underneath management with remedy. Her important fear now’s turning a “not very engaging shade of blue” if she goes within the daylight, as a result of medication; issue 50 is crucial always.
The perils of outdated age type the background to her newest publication, a standalone story, Minimize & Thirst. “Don’t say ‘outdated’, it’s ‘older’,” one among three mates insists, as they meet to plot the murders of 9 “has-been” male writers, as revenge for sabotaging the fame of a feminine novelist a few years in the past. The story is as sharp and glowing because the G&Ts the women knock again. “This can be a cosy crime that doesn’t come off,” Atwood chortles of her tackle the Richard Osman geriatric crime style.
Her “three innocent older girls with PhDs” plot in opposition to a cabal of bookish bullies, specifically “The Humph”: “Humphrey had come from England. The place else? … His Englishness was thought by him to confer a superpower in issues literary, a view as soon as shared by many others; although it certainly is shared now not, Myrna displays with satisfaction.” Ouch!
Tantalisingly, this literary feud is seemingly based mostly on actual occasions. “How might it not be?” she twinkles mischievously. “Within the age of Martin Amis, that sort of factor went on rather a lot.” Nevertheless it’s not about Amis and mates (Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan et al) again of their swaggery heyday, she insists. “It’s a kind of conditions through which who you’re,” is all she’s going to say.
Within the story the “has-beens” keep away from being killed off utterly – an advanced plan involving brownies laced with laxatives backfires. “Folks have performed that,” she says, elevating one among her owlish eyebrows even larger. “We will probably be listening to from outdated white guys once more,” she predicts, with a smile. “We went via quite a few years through which individuals had been saying ‘Oh, outdated white guys, boring, boring, boring’,” she drawls. “However now they will write about being outdated white guys on this local weather, which is kind of totally different from being outdated white guys 20 years in the past.”
Atwood likes to take the lengthy view, mentioning that “literary feuds are a long-standing factor. Ever since Roman occasions they had been slanging epigraphs about one another round.” Although the fallout from such spats is way extra poisonous than within the days of poison pen letters in literary magazines. “I assume we’re getting via that part of behaviour,” Atwood muses on what she calls “modern-day guillotining” through social media, predicting that the warmth will finally die out of the present tradition wars. “This stuff get too excessive, and middle-of-the-road individuals flip in opposition to them.”
We’ve met the “gaggle of hags” in Minimize & Thirst in an earlier story, Airborne. All three are retired lecturers – “What kind of panel?” one asks of a current radio look. “Chrissy drops her voice. ‘Gender.’ ‘Fuck,’ says Leonie. ‘Snake pit!’” She has nice enjoyable together with her sweary bluestockings who balk at using “completely” as a modifier and are triggered by set off warnings.
Leonie’s speciality is the French Revolution. Atwood has been studying rather a lot in regards to the French Revvie, as Leonie calls it, these days. “It was like a snowball starting to roll down the hill, after which it will get larger and greater. At any level individuals might have made selections that will have turned it the opposite means,” she says. “It was the template for lots of later revolutions, each on the left and on the best, and I’d rely [Trump’s] Maga motion amongst these.”
In an article for this paper following the assault on Salman Rushdie in August 2022, Atwood wrote that American democracy is underneath menace like by no means earlier than. “It’s positively underneath menace,” she says now, although she’s reluctant to foretell the election outcome. “A variety of issues can occur between at times. Both of these individuals might simply fall over,” she warns. However she may be very clear on what the result will imply: “You may have a alternative between any person who for sure, and has stated so, will impose a vengeful tyranny, and one other one who wouldn’t,” she says. “You get dictatorships when occasions are dangerous and chaotic, as a result of persons are prepared to commerce of their democratic rights for any person who says they will repair it. That’s normally a lie. However that’s the way you get there.”
Questions of freedom of expression are “entrance and centre” proper now, she believes, with each left and proper turning to censorship. “‘You must take this guide out of the varsity as a result of it hurts my little one’s emotions,’ says one hand, and the opposite hand says ‘Nicely this different guide hurts my little one’s emotions, so you need to take it out.’ And that goes on till there aren’t any books left. In case you go too far down the street in both course, you shut down political speech.” Whereas she doesn’t assume that is more likely to occur in Britain any time quickly – “the British are fairly mouthy, you might have observed” – it’s taking place in components of America.
When Atwood speaks the world listens, with good purpose: the monetary crash, the rise of the acute proper and the infringement of ladies’s freedoms in recent times have all been anticipated in her work. “I simply listen,” she likes to say. Her standing as a global treasure and seer means she is ceaselessly sought out for her opinions on the most popular problems with the day, in addition to panel discussions and occasions.
“I’m a sort of strolling opinion ballot,” she says. “I can inform by the questions that folks ask me what’s on their minds. What’s the factor they’re obsessing about in the mean time.” The backwards flip of ladies’s rights, with the ruling simply this month that the 1864 whole ban on abortion be enforced in Arizona, for instance, is excessive on the record. However as all the time she is cautious to emphasize that there isn’t any one reply to questions in regards to the future for girls. “I’ve to ask which ladies? How outdated? What nation? There are numerous totally different variations of ladies.”
She attributes her outspokenness to the truth that she doesn’t have a job: “You possibly can say issues that different individuals could be afraid to as a result of they are going to lose their job or get cancelled.” Within the wake of the #MeToo motion, for instance, she was accused of being “a Unhealthy Feminist” for demanding a good listening to for a Canadian inventive writing lecturer who had been sacked for sexual harassment – the tag didn’t stick.
As soon as once more we’re again to the French Revolution, and a gaggle referred to as the “toads of the Marsh”, the moderates within the French Home of Commons. “The toads had been normally fairly silent, however they did maintain the stability of energy,” she explains. Be they in 18th-century France or the swamp of recent American politics, the toads are all the time courted by these on the extremes to win their votes. “So it’s not all dangerous being a silent individual within the center,” she says. “I’m not one as a result of I’m not silent. However I do really feel that my place on this stuff is normally extra in direction of the center than anyplace else.”
In brief, she is rigorously even-handed about every little thing (“the orange man” apart). “Annoying, isn’t it,” she agrees. Nevertheless it didn’t all the time save the toads from getting their heads lower off. “All meaning is that you just get attacked by each side.”
Whereas as soon as she was once requested why she hates males, now everybody needs to know “Is there hope?” Sometimes she solutions this query not by consulting her crystal ball, however by seeking to the previous: each technology tends to assume they’re dwelling via the top occasions, she argues as somebody born on the brink of the second world warfare, and who had simply printed her first guide on the time of the Cuban missile disaster. Hope itself is “a include”, she says. “It comes with being human. It comes with the grammar that we’ve got devised, which permits us to speak in regards to the future, which doesn’t exist but. It’s a assemble of the creativeness.”
When she was 18, she wrote a narrative about an aged girl, who “was dusty and used up and with out hope and coated with cobwebs,” she says. “And that individual was 40.” Now, practically midway via her ninth decade, there are not any cobwebs on Atwood. At one level in our chat, she leaps as much as showcase her orange orthopaedic chair (“Take care of your again!” is her primary tip for writers), lifting it to digital camera top in a means that will do for lesser mortals.
On occasion she pops as much as depart her examine (an orderly muddle of books and images), returning with a guide she needs to suggest: one about utopian experiments, “an intimate” historical past of pockets and a guide by an skilled on violent behaviour – this night she is attending a fundraiser for a Canadian organisation referred to as Shelter Movers, which helps victims of home violence.
Just like the older girls in Minimize & Thirst, when she meets up together with her mates there’s a routine well being examine. The “Organ Recital”, as they name it: a stroke; a nasty fall; cracked vertebra from going over a pace bump too quick. “Are you aware what a strangulated femoral artery hernia is?” she fires off at one level, the latest drama to befall one among her circle. “The record goes on,” she says cheerily.
For Atwood herself, “nothing has modified. I’m very busily at work.” She’s simply again from a few months writing in San Miguel, Mexico – “it’s fairly slippery in Toronto in February and March” – the place she additionally had a gentle stream of home visitors, on the situation that they did all of the cooking.
After years of insisting that she would by no means write a memoir, she is lastly doing simply that. “They ganged up on me,” she says of her editor and brokers. “I obtained talked into it.” To this point she’s having a lot of enjoyable: “I’m an inherently frivolous individual and what you may normally bear in mind is silly issues that occurred,” she says. “I haven’t obtained to the unhappy components but. All people continues to be alive.”
Concentrate, she tells me sternly. “I’m from a distinct technology. We don’t do grief in public.” Writing of her resolution to hold on with the UK tour for The Testaments after Gibson’s demise, she asks: “Given a alternative between lodge rooms and occasions and folks on the one hand, and an empty home and a vacant chair on the opposite, which might you may have chosen, Pricey Reader?” The empty home and vacant chair got here her means later, she writes, “as such issues do”.
However she does do grief on the web page. The elegiac Nell and Tig tales a couple of long-married couple that body her most up-to-date assortment, Outdated Babes within the Wooden, are tender dispatches from the empty home, the place Nell lives “like a scholar once more” after Tig’s demise: “the identical formless nervousness, the identical bare-bones meals”. Suffused with sorrow, these tales are among the many most private of Atwood’s writing. “All the things in them is true,” she says. “I cherished him dearly,” she writes within the poem Dearly.
Subsequent month she is off on her annual journey to Pelee Island, the place she and Gibson would all the time go birding in Might (he based the Chook Observatory there). She has inherited a number of of his initiatives to maintain her busy. Then she is off to a literary pageant in Dublin, the place she is showing at an occasion with Mary Robinson, the previous – first feminine – president of Eire, and American musician Laurie Anderson (Atwood’s a fan). Within the autumn she is coming to London for the opening of a ballet of her dystopian MaddAddam trilogy (a couple of group of survivors after a world pandemic), a smash hit in Toronto in 2022, on which she collaborated with choreographer Wayne McGregor. In yet one more occasion of alarming Atwoodian prescience, the ballet was due to open on the Royal Opera Home in 2020, however was postponed due to Covid. And she or he will probably be within the UK in time to launch the publication of a brand new number of her poetry.
Nonetheless jetting about, I say.
“Nonetheless! I like the way in which individuals use this phrase ‘nonetheless’!” she shoots again. “My God, is she STILL alive?”
