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The character assassin: Margaret Atwood tells Susan Flockhart that
Sunday Herald, The, Oct 8, 2000 by Susan Flockhart
THERE'S a line in Margaret Atwood's latest novel that catches you in the throat like a sob. It's about time, "old cold time, old sorrow, settling down in layers like silt in a pond". It is not Atwood who makes the observation, but The Blind Assassin's protagonist, Iris Chase. And as Atwood keeps reminding us, she is not her characters, so bumbling interviewers have no business drawing conclusions about the state of her emotions.
Indeed, commentators have searched in vain for evidence of the tormented life which might explain Atwood's literary preoccupation with pain. Happily cohabiting with her partner of 28 years, she has a talented daughter, and no skeletons have emerged from the closet of her beautiful Toronto home. Yet Iris's words speak so poignantly of a particular kind of emotional discomfort, it is impossible to believe the author conjured them up from anywhere but the depths of her own soul.
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"You can't get to my age without feeling that," says the writer who's been dubbed the High Priestess of Pain. "It's simply not possible. Nobody has a life that's all daisies."
The tiny, elfin figure that is Canada's most lauded novelist is sipping cappuccino from a china cup in an opulent hotel lounge. Atwood is in London to promote her 15th novel, the fourth to be nominated for the Booker Prize. Fluffy-haired and wearing a soft, cherry-coloured mohair sweater, she doesn't look scary. Yet this 60- year-old has a reputation among interviewers for being spiky, frosty, even witch-like.
Baloney. Margaret Atwood is a gentle-voiced charmer, and if your ego winds up the size of a pinhead in her company, that's because few can help feeling like blundering idiots beside the awesome intelligence of a literary expert who was devouring books while most of us were playing with rattles.
Contrary to rumour, she insists, she has never told an interviewer that their questions were too stupid to be answered. Not that she needs to. The message is subliminally there in some of her answers. "Short stories are short, novels are long," she once replied when asked about the distinction between the genres. And today, I find myself squirming after asking how she views one critic calling her reactionary for assigning traditional female roles to the sisters whose pre-war lives unfold in The Blind Assassin. "Well guess what? Women used to be in traditional roles. That's why they're called trad- it-ion-al." (Helpfully, she separates out each syllable as though addressing a child.) The new book is a novel within a novel within a novel: a pulp fiction sci-fi tale, concocted by a handsome Bolshevik and a well-heeled society girl, whose illicit affair forms the basis of the posthumously- published novel by Laura Chase, herself one of the sibling stars of Atwood's book. Confused? Read the novel, and you'll find the relationships between the three stories gets murkier still, as the elaborately structured plot leads us to wonder about the true identities of the story-telling lovers and the authorship of The Blind Assassin.
Atwood - whose last book, Alias Grace, reinterpreted a real-life 19th century Canadian murder story - is fascinated by the ambiguous relationships between truth and fiction, good and evil. In Atwood country, no-one is ever wholly good or bad, past mingles with present and future and nothing is ever quite what it seems. Most of the action in The Blind Assassin takes place during the early 1930s, but is recounted 60 years later by the 82-year-old Iris. "At a certain point, people have an impulse to construct their lives as a narrative. When you're younger, you don't have enough material: time stretches ahead and you don't know what will happen. By 80, you pretty much know what the story is, and have an impulse to sort it out."
Iris's "sorting out" forms the basis of The Blind Assassin. With a 91-year-old mother and two octogenerian aunts, Atwood has at her disposal plenty of first-hand experience of the ageing process. And thanks to meticulous historical research (she employs three researchers to ensure the authenticity of every detail, from underwear designs to shopping bags), Iris's childhood memories are as vivid as her frustrated reflections on her deteriorating body. Atwood believes childhood events are our most intense experiences, simply because they are unprecedented. "When people say they can't remember their childhoods, you have to wonder what happened to make those years so intensely forgettable."
Atwood herself has a good memory; so far, at least. (She taps the wooden table; Atwood appears superstitions and talks a lot about luck.) She denies deliberately storing up painful experiences for later use, but laughingly recalls a conversation with short story writer Alice Munro. "Never mind," said Munro conspiratorially, after the pair had exchanged horrific recent experiences, "it's all material."
The taste and smell of grief and loss permeate Iris's account of the sisters' childhood: the stillborn sibling lying beside bloodsoaked bedding, grey, "like an old cooked potato", with a head too big and eyes "squinched up as though the light was hurting it". Their dying mother, smelling of milk "and of something raw, something rancid, like the brown paper meat came wrapped in". And afterwards, little Laura, seeking comfort by curling up in her dead mother's fur coat.
