The first lady of Canadian literature, le grande dame herself. (That is: Margaret Atwood.)
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Knox United Church
Tuesday, September 29 - Tuesday, September 29
More in: Literary
“Hello?”
I recognize the voice on the other end of the line as soon as she picks up the phone. I’d know those drawn out vowels anywhere. But instead of comforting me, the familiar nasal tone gives me pause. Do I attempt to impress her with an erudite observation or casually disarm her with a charming witticism?
Naturally, I freeze.
“Can I please speak with Margaret Atwood?”
For the next hour, I struggle to keep up with the doyenne of Canadian literature. Although she is promoting The Year of the Flood, a novel that revisits the dystopian future explored in the bestselling Oryx and Crake, our conversation is wide-ranging and peppered with paragraph-length digressions punctuated with wry asides and her characteristic chortle. (Click here for the interview transcript.)
Acting as a companion piece to Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood shares with its predecessor an impending ecological apocalypse and a handful of recurring characters. Told in a timeframe that runs roughly parallel to the first book and converges in the final scenes, The Year of the Flood shows what happens to characters on the fringes when society crumbles.
When I ask why she decided to return to this alternative reality, she says with a laugh, “One, everybody asked me what happens next. Second, in Oryx and Crake, the character in it is on the inside, he’s actually a member of the more privileged elite, though he’s at the bottom of the heap of that group whereas people in The Year of the Flood are on the outside. So they are the real bottom of the heap, and I thought it would be very interesting to look at the same world from that angle.”
The bottom-dwellers she’s talking about are Ren, an exotic dancer who survives the “waterless flood” in the high-end sex club Scales and Tails, and Toby, a God’s Gardener holed up in the AnooYoo Spa. As the book opens, both women are wondering if they are alone in the plague-ravaged world. The more we learn about their backstory, the clearer it becomes that they are united by their involvement with a fringe religious movement.
“In Oryx and Crake, there was a group that had already started to, in a way, coalesce in the real world,” says Atwood, explaining what drew her to expand upon the God’s Gardeners. “So I took that movement further down the road to see what a somewhat extreme form of it might look like. The trends are with us today.”
It is her ability to see what’s happening in the real world and incorporate it into her work that has allowed Atwood to remain relevant 40 years after publishing her first novel. Less than a year ago, she delivered her Massey Lecture and the accompanying book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, a meditation on conceptions of debt and justice released as the financial meltdown was in full swing. Upon publication, she was hailed as a clairvoyant.
As the movement to reconcile faith and ecology gains momentum, Atwood once again finds herself tapped into the zeitgeist. Take The Green Bible.
Published soon after she finished The Year of the Flood, this environmentally conscious interpretation of the Bible features an introduction by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and a green twist on the tradition of putting Jesus’s words in red letters. Every chapter and verse that speaks to environmental stewardship is printed in green, with a section offering practical advice on living harmoniously with nature. It’s the kind of book you could imagine sitting on the God’s Gardeners’ bookshelf. The very existence of the book is, for Atwood, evidence of a widening rift within Christianity.
“That split in Christian fundamentalism was already becoming apparent when I wrote Oryx and Crake and now it’s further advanced,” she says. “Some of them say, why bother, it’s all going to be burnt up and we’ll get a new one, and others are saying, no, we were supposed to be taking care of this.”
But Atwood is quick to dismiss proclamations of her clairvoyance. Her gift, she says, is for paying close attention to the present.
“I do read the ads on the subway, I do look at ads in newspapers, I look at all of those things, having been an old, ancient Marshall McLuhan person,” she says. “You can watch things moving from back of the paper to front of the paper or from minor topic of conversation to major topic of conversation. You can see that happening and I’m interested in those things when they’re minor.”
This approach may explain why Atwood, the honorary co-president of BirdLife International’s Rare Bird Club and a committed conservationist, has returned to themes of ecological disaster at the hands of malicious corporations. The same hubris that led to the financial crisis discussed in Payback could just as easily lead to an environmental catastrophe.
For Atwood, the world of Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood isn’t a wild flight of fancy, it’s a future extrapolated directly from our present. While her books are not science fiction in the familiar sense they are undeniably fictions informed by science. The starting point isn’t in laser beams and rocket ships, it’s in scientific journals and research. For Atwood, whether we use science, religion or art to try to understand our world, we are all asking the same questions.
“[My books are] all asking, ‘Where did we come from,’ ‘What are we doing here,’ ‘Where are we going,’ those three essential questions,” she says. “Science, art and religion ask the same set of questions. They approach them in different ways, but they are essentially, ‘Who are we?’ Sometimes they’re ‘How do we get out of this mess?’ but that has to do with ‘Who are we?’”
Inquiring minds lucky enough to get tickets to Atwood’s sold-out performance-based reading at Knox United Church on September 29 will be treated to a spectacle she calls “unprecedented and unrepeatable.” With aspects of the novel incorporated into a script for three actors, including Trevor Leigh as the leader of God’s Gardeners, Laura Parken as Toby and Arielle Rombough as Ren, narration by Atwood herself, and featuring the Knox United Church choir singing hymns composed by Orville Stoeber, expect a reading unlike any you’ve seen before.
Comments: 1
Georgina wrote:
The choir was brilliant in their performance of Atwood's hymns. The musical composition was clever with at least one hymn that contains rather morbid lyrics being set to a jaunty, upbeat melody. As each hymn was sung, Atwood tapped her foot along to the music smiling as if trying to cover laughter at parts. She called the choir brave, at the onset, for agreeing to perform the songs in the first place.
The venue was a wonderful, older solid stone church with soaring ceilings and fabulous stained glass windows. And, of course, great acoustics. It was a fitting setting to hear the preaching of Adam One as he exhorted his followers not to eat anything that has a face. The two other actors performed extremely well too.
Rather than general audience questions at the end, Atwood chose her five favourite questions that she's been asked over the years and chose to answer those. Among them was the question, "Do you hate men?" To which she answered, "It depends on which one you're talking about." She laughed; we laughed. The evening was wonderful.
And, I was first in line to have my copy of The Year of the Flood signed by her. (Pure luck on my part, truly. I'm never first in line for anything.) And I finally got to say to her what I've been anxious to tell her for years. I got to say, "Thank you".
on Oct 2nd, 2009 at 12:07am Report Abuse
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