Every time I write a new novel I wonder what kind of trouble I'll get into: Margaret Atwood on being called offensive and man-hating

 

Almost 30 years after the publication of The Handmaid’s Tale, her work has lost none of its ability to unsettle

'I almost always take myself aback with my ideas,' said Margaret Atwood

'I almost always take myself aback with my ideas,' said Margaret Atwood

'I hate to break this to you’, says Margaret Atwood in a comical stage whisper, ‘but some people don’t like me.’

Canada’s most celebrated author may have won the Booker Prize and the inaugural Arthur C Clarke Award and be a Companion of the Order of Canada, but at 74 she still stubbornly resists veneration.

Describe Atwood’s work – as some critics have – as ‘man-hating’, ‘offensive’ and ‘pornographic’ and she seems slightly thrilled. Just don’t call her ‘revered’.

‘Oh, it’s only because I’m old,’ she says. ‘If you live long enough that happens, but there’s a difference between being well-known and being revered.

'I get plenty of letters which begin, “You idiot!” Writing any book, I still wonder what kind of trouble am I going to get into this time?’

Plenty, is the usual answer.

Almost 30 years after the publication of The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood’s classic novel about a fundamentalist future state which uses women as tools for reproduction, her work has lost none of its ability to unsettle.

Her latest book, Stone Mattress, is a collection of nine disturbing tales that teeter on the outer edges of reality. The title story has already stirred up controversy among more sensitive American male critics.

Concerning a woman who suffers a traumatic assault when she is a teenager and exacts brutal revenge 50 years later, Atwood wrote it while on a trip to the Arctic Circle with her long-term partner, the novelist Graeme Gibson, with whom she has an adult daughter, Eleanor.

'It started out as a means of amusing people on a boat, by proposing how you might murder one of them without getting caught.’ She laughs.

‘They did find that vastly entertaining. Graeme, who has a devious criminal mind, told us how he would do it, and of course you would need a pretty good motive. I promised I would finish it. She’s done off with all her husbands. Let’s say she has eased them along.’

Does the woman who was once accused by a critic of ‘climbing a ladder to success made out of cut-off men’s heads’ subscribe to the story’s eye-for-an-eye moral?

‘The character is a man-hater for sure, but that doesn’t mean that I am,’ she says.

‘No, no, no. Otherwise Agatha Christie would have to have been a serial killer. I’m not endorsing any of this behaviour, but we do empathise with her. You always do in revenge stories.’

The Handmaid's Tale remains her most 'notorious' yet popular work. It has sold over ten million copies worldwide and in 1990 was adapted into a film starring Natasha Richardson

The Handmaid's Tale remains her most 'notorious' yet popular work. It has sold over ten million copies worldwide and in 1990 was adapted into a film starring Natasha Richardson

Meanwhile, The Handmaid’s Tale remains her most ‘notorious’ yet popular work.

It has sold over ten million copies worldwide and in 1990 was adapted – not altogether successfully – into a film scripted by Harold Pinter and starring Natasha Richardson.

‘Pinter wrote voiceover for the central character and the director took it out; it would have been better left in,’ she says.

‘And they changed the ending, as one does, but it was still pretty interesting.

'I visited the set at Duke University on the day they were hanging the handmaids outside on the scaffold.

'Suddenly, out of the door of the chapel came a wedding party, to be confronted by this horrible scene. Imagine! They were not in any way amused, but there you are. You can’t please everyone.’

The tale of Offred, one of many ‘handmaids’ enslaved to bear children for elite couples in the totalitarian state of Gilead, retains the power to offend.

In 2012, 2,300 people signed a petition in North Carolina to get the book taken off the local school’s reading list for its ‘negative view on religion and its anti-biblical attitudes toward sex’.

It’s just too close to the bone, reckons its author.

‘The way the Republicans have been behaving in the United States lately has given The Handmaid’s Tale a whole new lease of life,’ she says.

‘Quite shocking things came out of their mouths during the last election – like if a woman didn’t want to get pregnant she wouldn’t. It is unbelievable.

The Bind Assassin follows two sisters and their tangles with abuse, suicide and war

The Bind Assassin follows two sisters and their tangles with abuse, suicide and war

‘Just look around the world,’ she continues.

‘In Turkey, the deputy Prime Minister is ordering women not to laugh, and the coverage of Kate and baby George is really about, “Is she a good mother? Is she measuring up?”

'The world has always been full of people telling women what to do. Why are we surprised?’

Atwood relays all this with a laconic, seen-it-all drawl reminiscent of the heroine of a Forties film noir.

Sharp-tongued and fearsomely smart, she occasionally deploys the royal ‘we’ and does not tolerate sloppy thinking.

She was deeply unimpressed by Richard Dawkins’ recent comments on Twitter, where the world’s most famous atheist made a distinction between ‘mild’ date rape and ‘violent’ date rape.

‘Was he speaking from personal experience, I wonder?’ she asks drily.

‘He does have a knack for putting his foot in it, and then everyone yells and screams at him, which seems to make him very happy.

'So everyone has a good time except for the people who are actually getting raped.’

Atwood tweets enthusiastically herself, mostly about new books and her pet issue, the environment, but is ambivalent about the medium.

‘Social media was supposed to make us all aware of one another’s point of view, but it self-sorts,’ she says.

‘People turn off anything they don’t already like and only pay attention to people who agree with them. That can be very polarising.’

Atwood is no stranger to dividing opinion. Though she has stated that ‘the concept of Israel as a humane and democratic state is in serious trouble’, she attracted criticism in 2010 for accepting the $1m Dan David Prize from Tel Aviv University.

Regardless of her personal views, she insists she remains opposed to cultural boycotts. The Edinburgh Fringe’s controversial decision this month to cancel a show partially funded by the Israeli government, in protest at the situation in Gaza, did not meet with her approval.

‘I can’t possibly be in favour of it,’ she says. ‘It’s misplaced anger. They’re mad at Israel and it washes off on everybody who has anything to do with that country, even if they oppose the official views of the country.

'Some people would say you have to voice your displeasure in every possible way, other people would say you need to support the moderates within that country.’

She pauses.

‘Who is the Prime Minister of your country?’ David Cameron. She laughs. ‘Possibly not for long. But how would you like to be identified with all of his policies when you go abroad? It’s kind of hard lines on the performers.’

Margaret with novelist Graeme Gibson, with whom she has an adult daughter, Eleanor

Margaret with novelist Graeme Gibson, with whom she has an adult daughter, Eleanor

She may not suffer fools, gladly or otherwise, but Atwood is not remotely po-faced.

Three interlocking tales in Stone Mattress hark back to her student days at the University of Toronto in the late Fifties and early Sixties.

They detail the youthful bed-hopping, heavy drinking and general misbehaviour that went on among her obscure literary peers.

‘It’s all true, I’m just telling you,’ she says.

‘Writers are much better behaved nowadays, for a couple of reasons.

'Once upon a time nobody was thinking of a career, unless you lived in New York, so there wasn’t as much pressure to present a respectable exterior.

'And secondly, there was no social media.

'So if you were found face down on the floor – people did do that quite a bit; usually men, but not always – or fell through plate glass windows or got into scrapes, it became a rumour, and rumours are hard to pin down.

‘You probably come out of them somewhat better than the picture of you looking pie-eyed and really quite unattractive on the internet.

'Writers are aware of those possibilities a lot more nowadays than they once were. I think it’s a loss, though it’s really just nostalgia to think, “He vomited on my rug – wow! I’m never going to wash it again”.’ She laughs.

‘It’s generalised vomit, I’m not putting a name to it.’

Since her first novel, The Edible Woman, was published in 1969, Atwood’s books have wrestled with such prescient subjects as genetic engineering, religious fundamentalism, environmental catastrophe and the subjugation of women.

Their dystopian visions seem to surf just ahead of the times, giving the impression the world is playing catch-up to her imagination.

‘That’s my fear,’ she says. ‘My fear is, if I’m thinking about this someone else must be too.

'The U.S. Government tracking people through Google? That was predictable. I put it in my book The Year Of The Flood long before the current thing of, “Oh my goodness, they know where I am.” Of course they know where you are. They always do. If you can see it, it can see you. That’s true of just about anything.’

Her continuing novel, Positron, is being published in instalments on the web. What else does the future hold?

Between unwinding in front of ‘schlocky TV’ at home in Toronto and spending much of her spare time actively involved in environmental issues, her work ethic remains fierce.

‘I’m working on a novel adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and another version of The Handmaid’s Tale,’ she says. ‘It’s been a film, an opera, a ballet, and now it’s turning into a graphic novel.’

As for what else may be percolating in that vibrant imagination, even she’s not sure.

‘I almost always take myself aback with my ideas,’ she admits. ‘It would probably mean less hoo-ha in one’s life to write more conventional things but when I try to write something a bit more sedate it just doesn’t interest me.’

I suspect she would miss the hoo-ha just as much as we would.

‘Stone Mattress: Nine Tales’ by Margaret Atwood is published by Bloomsbury, priced £18.99. Order at mailbookshop.co.uk, p&p is free for a limited time only

THE ESSENTIAL MARGARET ATWOOD


 

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