Did Margaret Atwood Learn How To Fish As A Child?

Thirty-iv years after her most famous novel was published, Margaret Atwood, 79, has written its sequel, The Testaments. It is fresh on the shelves and has already been longlisted for the Booker Prize. In the interim, the events heralded past The Handmaid's Tale seem distressingly to have been coming true.

So, is Margaret – nature lover, eco-campaigner, armchair scientist – also a soothsayer, a prophet? The author of 64 books – of poetry, not-fiction, and children's tales also as novels – has no truck with such a notion, seeing instead possibilities where others see collapse, and enormous hope in a future in which she is fully engaged.

In the eye of the landscape that unfolds in forepart of Hellens, the haunted Tudor manor house in the Herefordshire village of Much Marcle where Margaret Atwood is staying, there is an elephant waving its trunk in the air. At get-go glance it appears both lifelike and appropriate: why wouldn't there be an elephant hither, roaming in the long grass by the lake? In this other-worldly place in that location are as well a pond, looming trees and a Victorian vegetable garden. Someone observes that it all feels a piffling Beatrix Potter, like Mr McGregor'south garden come to life. Simply this is not the kind of remark you can make lightly in the company of Margaret Atwood, who suggests that Mr McGregor's garden actually had more rows, and was tidier. Soon plenty she is expounding on the seduction narrative of Jemima Pool-Duck, Potter'due south influential Gothicism and the misunderstood heroism of Benjamin Bunny.

This is how conversation goes with Margaret: one thread pulls on another and you merely promise to go on track of the unravelling. Nosotros sit in Hellens's yard cartoon room nether the gaze of sombre family portraits, and every bit she settles into a vast sofa, red woolly socks reveal themselves under her sandals. For a moment, she seems almost grandmotherly – pinkish-framed glasses hang on a string around her neck, grey curls surround her uncannily youthful face. Only when she looks you in the centre, yous understand what yous're dealing with. These are optics that miss cipher, clear as torchlight. The low, lulling Canadian voice masks an ironic, exacting wit. At one point, talking about the electric current political culture's disregard for truth, she argues that facts are starting to thing over again. I say I promise she'south right, and she turns speedily, faux-haughty, eyes lit with amusement: "Have I ever been incorrect?"

Margaret and her partner, Graeme Gibson, are hither for the Ledbury Poetry Festival. This night she will read aloud some of her own poems, yet to be published, and tomorrow she'll read a sample of her favourite poems past women. Before the 17 novels, 8 books of short stories, ten works of non-fiction, children's books and a graphic novel, verse was how she started. ("If she weren't a famous novelist, she'd be a very famous poet," her agent, Karolina Sutton, tells me.) In the early 1970s, Margaret toured the Ottawa Valley in Ontario on Greyhound buses, sleeping on fellow poets' floors, gathering cash in envelopes from book sales at readings and and so giving it to her publisher. I say it sounds idyllic, and she cries out, "No!" It was hard, she says. The climate was hostile. There were inappreciably any writers, allow alone women writers. Her memories of interviews then, if she had any, were of men maxim, "I haven't read your book and I'm not going to." How would she respond? "Rudely."

Margaret'south status equally a touring writer is a little dissimilar now. Information technology is as if the Queen has come to town. Rooms hush when she enters. People automatically fan out to let her pass. One of Ledbury'south booksellers tweets, still in shock: "I sold a book to Margaret Atwood this evening. That. Is. All." Margaret herself seems unperturbed past the frenzy, or at least professionally oblivious. She is used to such reactions; her literary effect is of such a scale and endurance that she is garlanded wherever she goes. "Her contribution has been to pave the way," her old friend the publisher and writer Carmen Callil says of Margaret's influence on multiple generations of writers and readers. "She's read all over the world by young people." (The Handmaid'southward Tale alone has sold eight million copies in English.) And not only read but heard, being as engaged with the world equally she is with the page. "I recall of the practiced-citizen authors – she's one of those," says Lennie Goodings, another friend and the former publisher of Virago, which has published Atwood in the UK since 1979. "She understands what ability she tin wield and tries to do a adept job with that. I similar the fact that she understands her power."

That power has peradventure never been as potent equally it is right now, every bit she prepares to publish her next novel, The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid'southward Tale. On 10 September, publication day, Margaret volition be beamed live from the National Theatre in London to 1,000 cinemas worldwide. I wonder how she is preparing for the onslaught. "It's not my first rodeo," she replies, drily. Just she also expresses rare doubt. "What you're agape of is that there will be so much hoopla that when information technology'southward finally published anybody will say, 'What?'"

Here and in the opening image, Margaret is wearing a dark-green wool double-breasted coat by LOEWE. The silver-and-garnet earrings are by SLIM BARRETT and the band is Margaret's own. They are all worn throughout.

Everyone has been waiting a long time. Margaret wrote The Handmaid's Tale in 1984, at the age of 45, in West Berlin, on a typewriter. The book has gone on to become a cultural touchstone, a curriculum fixture. It tells the story of Gilead, a fundamentalist Christian theocracy which has overtaken America, from the betoken of view of Offred, a handmaid, one of the few remaining fertile women who have been spared from exile and quick death brought about past immigration up toxic waste in gild to brood on behalf of the ruling class. The Testaments is Margaret's answer to the questions people have been asking her e'er since The Handmaid'due south Tale was published. Does Offred escape? How does Gilead autumn? What happens adjacent? Margaret decided to answer those questions, she tells me, about three years ago, around the time Donald Trump was chosen as the Republican nominee for president of the Usa. "It was sort of a tipping betoken," she says. "I'd been mulling it over for a while, merely things were obviously going to go a lot more pear-shaped than I might take thought they'd go in 1987."

In recent years, The Handmaid's Tale has shifted in public perception from a work of speculative fiction, as Margaret describes it, to a horror guidebook to what Trump'south administration might be capable of. It is at present read as a kind of prophecy. "I know," she says, "and I regret that. I regret that circumstances are such that it feels prophetic. Had circumstances been otherwise it would have been dismissed equally a paranoid fantasy of the 1980s." The huge success of the Hulu television set accommodation, produced by Bruce Miller, with Elisabeth Moss as Offred, has introduced the story to a vast new audience. But it has become far more a fiction. Protests borrow the show's imagery: women dress as handmaids, in red robes and white bonnets, to demonstrate against wellness-care bills in Washington, DC, abortion laws in Northern Ireland and Trump'due south visit to London. It has become a symbol of opposition.

Inevitably, The Testaments will be read every bit the next chapter of the prophecy. Its action takes identify 15 years on from the first book, and then people volition pore over it for clues – how will this political nightmare end, how will Trump fall? Margaret, in all this, has been bandage every bit something of an oracle. "People call her Cassandra," Goodings says. "Just she's non very addicted of it." As Margaret tours universities and literary festivals, her audiences tend to ask nervously for answers, as though she might take some special power to know how events will unfold. "I refuse it!" she says. "You can't predict the time to come. Blindsiding events can come out of nowhere and disrupt your whole idea of how things are going to be."

Photographed in the gardens of Hellens in Herefordshire, Margaret is wearing a cotton fiber floral print shirtdress past VIVIENNE WESTWOOD.

When Margaret Atwood decided to be a writer, it wasn't a career. Or at least no one else idea information technology was. She told her friends in the school cafeteria information technology was what she was going to practise, equally though information technology were a done deal. "I was quite ignorant," she recalls. "I didn't know what would be involved. I just thought, I tin do this." Key to the unquestioning self-belief was not growing up in a community where she felt people were judging her, in contrast to her adept friend and boyfriend Canadian author Alice Munro. "She took pains to muffle in her youth that she was writing, because she thought everyone would laugh at her," Margaret says, "and she was right. In a community like that [Munro grew upward in rural Ontario], they would take. I didn't have to deal with that at all."

Margaret's great reward was to grow up with almost no community to speak of. The myth goes that she was raised "in the woods", like some kind of wolf-child, and it's not so far from the truth. Her begetter, Carl, was an entomologist, and for large parts of the year the family – Margaret, her parents and her elder brother, Harold, at present a neurophysiologist – decamped to the wilderness of northern Quebec, where Carl had an experimental forest insect lab. (Atwood's younger sister, Ruth, was born in 1951.) Margaret and her brother roamed fairly free, and both accept a lifelong devotion to nature, birds in particular, born of weeks on end in the wild. She didn't attend school full-time until the age of 12, 2 years ahead of her age group. She was spooked by flushing toilets.

Margaret credits her parents with being forward-looking for their time – they never told her she couldn't do something because she was a girl. They worried about her writing ambitions, but only because they were anxious about money. They had lived through the Low, and Margaret was born in 1939, a wartime child who grew up learning not to waste product a thing. Her parents knew life could be tough as hell, and they wanted their children to be able to back up themselves. In that location was no question of existence pushed to ally a rich man. Luckily, or more probable every bit a consequence, Margaret was, equally she puts information technology, "a mercenary little kid". (In high school she and a partner started a puppet-show business organization that toured toddler parties and became a word-of-mouth hitting on the nursery school circuit.)

Every bit a young author trying to establish herself in what was then a fairly inhospitable non-industry, Margaret was told by her American publisher that she needed an agent. "What'southward that?" she replied. Writing was a hand-to-oral fissure existence, and she had day jobs didactics at universities for years. Crucial to what she agrees is a kind of lifelong bloody-minded perseverance were two aunts, her mother'southward sisters, who supported her from the off. "My aunts were sterling. They were stellar," she says. One, Kae Killam Cogswell, was the starting time woman to get an MA in history from the University of Toronto; she promptly went home, married the local medico and had 6 kids. The 2nd, Joyce Barkhouse, had ambitions to write too, simply during Margaret's childhood was telling stories in Lord's day schoolhouse. She became a well-known children's author in fourth dimension (she co-wrote Anna'due south Pet with Margaret in 1980), and she encouraged her niece. "I was writing books with sexual practice in them and stuff, which you might think that generation from that place would take a dim view of," Margaret recalls. "Just they backed me up all the manner."

Later multiple collections of poetry, Margaret published her first novel in 1969. The Edible Woman was a book "about anorexia before we even knew that word," Lennie Goodings recalls. Margaret was already well known in Canada, but Goodings remembers reviewers in the UK existence slightly mystified by her, and interviewers oftentimes misunderstanding – or declining to detect –her subtle humour. Three more novels followed in the 1970s – Surfacing, Lady Oracle and Life Before Man – before the major works of the 1980s and '90s, including the Booker-nominated novels Cat's Eye (1988) and Alias Grace (1996).

From her earliest works, Margaret's reputation as a writer fatigued to subjects around gender and sexual politics was confirmed. "We were comrades in a way," Ursula Owen, a co-founder of Virago, says. "It was the early on days of the women's movement. I know she says she wasn't writing feminist books, but, you know, she was i of us." Margaret's feminism has long been dissected; latterly she has plant herself defenseless up in Twitter-ish storms when expressing a characteristic unwillingness to exist boxed in to assumed definitions and opining that the #MeToo movement was the result of a broken legal system. In a column last year in the Canadian Globe and Mail (headline: "Am I a Bad Feminist?"), she stated that her "fundamental position is that women are human beings, with the total range of saintly and demonic behaviours this entails, including criminal ones."

Looking dorsum, Margaret reflects that the tough part of a writer'due south career isn't the early years, when you lot're in your 20s and nonetheless deemed youthful and exciting. It's the next bit: the onset of middle age. "You're not the young thing and you lot're not the éminence grise," she says, drawing out "griiiise" to the point of delicious parody. These are the long years when you just have to keep going, even though no ane's particularly interested any more. Many authors drift to the sidelines.

Margaret didn't migrate. In her middle menstruum, she wrote The Handmaid's Tale.

"Had circumstances been otherwise The Handmaid's Tale would have been dismissed as a paranoid fantasy of the 1980s."

The "axiom", Margaret says, of both The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments is that every deed of imaginative cruelty has happened, in real life, somewhere before. Margaret has the clippings to testify it. For years, she clipped newspapers and magazines and noted down horrors from her large collection of history books. (Now she patiently prints things off the net or bookmarks them.) The Testaments no longer has Offred's vox at its eye. Instead, we are given the witness testimony of two teenage girls – one, Agnes, is Gilead born and bred, the kid of a commander and his wife; the other is a Canadian who writes school projects on Gilead and campaigns for freedom for its citizens. At that place is a tertiary strand, as well – an business relationship written, y'all gradually realise, by Aunt Lydia, the headmistress-cum-abusive-godmother figure to the handmaids. No spoilers, I promise, simply revelations well-nigh Aunt Lydia's pre-Gilead life follow that seem radical if you've but ever considered the grapheme as a figment of your nightmares. At one point, in a flashback to Gilead's early days, Aunt Lydia describes a prison where the lights are left on all night (but i of many degradations). I realise I'd recently read a description of Trump'south edge camps that sounded remarkably similar. "That's standard," Margaret says calmly. "They've been doing that for years."

If The Handmaid's Tale is totalitarianism in its barbarous prime, then The Testaments is what happens when the centre no longer holds, when the whole encarmine creature starts to consume itself. There are echoes of the death of Stalin hither, the savage fallout of the French Revolution, everyone turning on each other. Like many of Margaret's books, it is more the product of historical scholarship than a wild guess at the future. She delves, too, into the touch on a generation of young women who accept never known anything but the repressive, abusive Gilead regime. "The developed female person torso was one big booby trap, every bit far as I could tell," Agnes writes. "If there was a hole, something was bound to be shoved into it and something else was spring to come up out. There were and so many things that could exist done to information technology or go wrong with it, this adult female body, that I was left feeling I would be better off without it."

And so there is the other side: the heroics of those who hide refugees, the intricate underground networks of spies and rebels, escape channels and prophylactic houses. The French Resistance served as inspiration. Margaret tells me the story of her friend François, who escaped execution during the 2nd Globe State of war by being smuggled into Spain, where he was interned past General Franco. He was then traded by the British for a sack of flour. "Just it was a verrrry biiig sack," Margaret says. He went on to work with French intelligence in London under Charles de Gaulle. I ask her how they met. "I knew him in the south of France," she replies with tantalising vagueness.

The procedure of writing The Testaments was in some ways typical of all her writing – she did information technology in hotel rooms, on aeroplanes and trains, wherever she happened to exist. Planes, Margaret says, are her friends. "Unless I get decoyed into watching, as recently, Captain Underpants." Simply this fourth dimension she had to contend with an extra challenge. While she was writing, the team behind the television adaptation of The Handmaid'southward Tale were deep into creating the third series, which goes across the novel's narrative. It'due south hard to remember of some other example like this – Game of Thrones comes close in that the showrunners completed George RR Martin'due south story before he had written the final book. Simply that wasn't a simultaneous process. Margaret would have regular conversations with the producer, Bruce Miller, while they were both writing. "I said, 'You cannot impale this person off, or this person, or this person,'" she says. "He was fine with that." I wondered who'd seeded the proper name Nicole, which belongs to a character who appears first in the television show and is besides in the new book. On this, Margaret is very articulate: "I said she had to be Nicole."

The show has stuck to Offred's story, but Margaret has now expanded Gilead's horizons. Of Miller, she says, "I've given him a whole new canvas." There could be who knows how many more seasons, filling in the gaps. They could even practise a prequel, an Aunt Lydia spin-off. Just in that location was also cantankerous-pollination in the other direction. "I was inspired by the performance of Ann Dowd, who gave Aunt Lydia more dimensions than she had in the original book," Margaret tells me. Every bit for Miller, he says working with Margaret is pure pleasance. He runs scripts by her and asks her communication on how things might turn out for a particular graphic symbol. "It'south like having a writer in your writers' room who's much better read than you are and much smarter than y'all," he tells me by telephone from Los Angeles. "She'south like 30 steps alee of me all the time."

Later in the evening, Margaret arrives at the community hall in Ledbury to read her poetry. The hot, packed crowd whisper to each other equally she climbs the stairs to the stage, a sheaf of loose pages poking out of her big black bag. The room adjusts to her presence, a shuffling deference amongst the rows. She is introduced by Ursula Owen, who gives the expected fulsome introduction. All the books, all the awards. Then Margaret steps up and says she asked Ursula earlier if she should sing a song well-nigh Canada to kicking off. Ursula said yes. Then Margaret begins, in a slightly tremulous but strangely compelling voice, to sing "Canada'southward Really Big", by a Canadian band chosen Arrogant Worms. "When I look around me, I tin't believe what I meet / Information technology seems as if this land has lost its will to live! / The economy is lousy, we barely have an regular army / Only we tin can still stand proudly 'cause Canada's really large!"

The room bursts open up with laughter – the lyrics are witty, certain, but mostly it's out of delighted surprise. "I didn't know she was funny," someone sitting virtually me says.

Here's the matter: Margaret is funny all the time. She's funny even when she's talking about torture regimes and how the globe might cease, which is quite often. She'due south besides unexpectedly optimistic, more hopeful than you might imagine the creator of literature's near notorious dystopia to exist. The Testaments ends on what feels like a happy note. "Well, it's qualified optimism," she corrects me. "These things practice come up to an finish. They do, one way or another."

Some of the poems she reads in Ledbury are adequately unrelenting in their bleakness. Ane imagines a near-future globe in full-blown climate crisis and how its children will fare: "Will your eyes blank out like the white eyes of sunless fish?" But despite these moments that prompt low groans from the crowd, she always manages to lift the mood. She lets the audience vote on the tone of the last poem she'll read: "Mean or gloomy?" And when a worried questioner asks if the stop is nearly, she tells them to go to the website of Project Drawdown, a compendium of various global schemes to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere. (When I visit the website a few days later, the testimonial on the abode page is from Atwood.)

"Have I always been wrong?"

Environmentalism has been Margaret'south bag for decades, from the time when relentless forest fires and floods represented a future threat rather than a daily reality. She'south a lover of birds and an advocate for their conservation – of course she is, the kid from the forest – but she's also a campaigner. She's been in the game long plenty to see possibility every bit opposed to inevitable collapse. "People are making efforts. The question is, will the efforts be enough? Not enough to avoid the weather blips we've been having, merely possibly enough to avoid us choking to death because the oceans die." Qualified optimism, equally she says.

At home in Toronto, Margaret checks the conditions blips obsessively on her computer – partly out of an interest in the planet, by and large out of an involvement in the garden that she tends with care. She goes for regular walks. "Where practise I walk? Here and thither." The walks usually happen with a friend, and their ultimate purpose is usually a latte and a scratch bill of fare. "Cheap thrills," she says. She looks afterward Graeme, her partner, who, as she puts it, "isn't 35 any more", and she has a daughter, Eleanor, 43; two stepsons, Matt and Grae, at present in their 50s; and iii grandchildren, aged 18, 16 and three, to whom, she says, she'southward a reasonable grandmother. I doubtable this is typical understatement. One of her poems is most picking blackberries with a kid, every bit her grandmother did with her. At that place'due south a sense of generation to generation, a chain of love. When I ask if she struggled with her children growing up, with having to let go, with the quotidian gut pain that defines parenthood and grandparenthood, she replies, "Oh, of course. I retrieve it's the going away to college – everybody goes 'Waaah.'" She feigns tears. "Just and then they're back with the laundry."

For years she'south been giving all her papers (575 boxes and counting) to the University of Toronto's Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. "You have to get them out of the firm," she says. Her reading matter must have up masses of space. In a single chat, you get a sense of its span: a constantly updating roll call of gimmicky fiction and poetry, only as well swathes of history – Russia, China, Europe – spliced with niche academic papers on hormones. When I ask her what publications she reads regularly, we but get equally far equally the scientific ones – Scientific American, New Scientist, Science News, Discover, National Geographic, Nature – earlier her mind is diverted elsewhere. On her energetic Twitter feed (one.94 million followers) she is constantly recommending young authors and books by friends and linking to manufactures from circular the world. Her encephalon is 1 of those lucky ones that seems to blot knowledge past osmosis and and so non to shed it, ever. Towards the stop of our chat, in another Beatrix Potter segment, she started to sing a song nearly Peter Rabbit she'd overheard being rehearsed in her classroom when she was 13. She was discussion-perfect, the lyrics all there, mentally filed side by side to Bolshevik history and mass extinction events.

Margaret has patented six inventions. The start, in 2006, was the LongPen, a device that enables one to write on a tablet and the words to appear in ink, reproduced by robotic hand, anywhere in the world. It's ideal for remote book signings, though Margaret endeavours to inscribe as many of her novels as possible in person.

By the time Margaret turns 80 in November, she will most likely have had the almost intensive, high-octane twelvemonth of her life. She will delight in it, all the encounters and stimulation. The dark before we met, she'd been at dinner with a Chinese survivor of Tiananmen Foursquare and a Swedish folk band; and was apparently equally tuned in to both worlds. But this is also a stage of life when friends start to autumn by the wayside. Margaret'southward sometime schoolmates used to come up to her readings and accost her with renditions of a domicile economics musical she wrote in high school, merely at least ii of the leads have now died. Her mind inevitably tilts towards her own expiry. Her current, extremely Atwoodian preoccupation is how to dispose of her corpse in an environmentally responsible way. She has get taken by the idea of it being "recomposed" – that is, put in a pod in a facility, left to decompose then turned into compost that tin can exist sprinkled on plants. "You tin can get a mushroom bury now," she says, impressed. "And so I might exercise that." The odour-proofing must be pretty good at the facility, I suggest. She gives me a await. "Je suppose." In Margaret's earth, even death is a potential opportunity to engage with the world (she is a seed investor in the Seattle facility Recompose, which, she tells me, used to be called the Urban Decease Projection).

She has besides ensured that her work is safely lodged in the hereafter. Five years ago, she was the get-go writer to contribute to the Futurity Library projection, an thought conceived by the Scottish creative person Katie Paterson in which every year for 100 years a writer will deposit a work in a specially designed room at the Oslo public library in Kingdom of norway. The room will not be opened until 2114. "She was my first pick," Paterson tells me. "Her voice goes across generations."

A thousand trees were planted in the Nordmarka forest at the project'due south inception. The whole idea, Margaret says, is 1 containing enormous promise. Hope for the trees that will abound; hope for a hereafter world that will still contain libraries, books, readers. No wonder people plow to her for answers, for soothsaying; she has an eye on all that is to come, and she sees possibility. If she has a bulletin for y'all, it is just this: "It's not over." From her expression – that cool, still gaze – I swear she does actually know something we don't, that somehow she can see it. But mayhap that's just bullheaded hope on my part. She repeats, insistent, "It's non over! Commonwealth is not over."

Did Margaret Atwood Learn How To Fish As A Child?,

Source: https://thegentlewoman.co.uk/library/margaret-atwood

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