The character assassin: Margaret Atwood tells Susan Flockhart that

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.

"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.

Why does Atwood dwell so excruciatingly on pain? "Let me tell you a story," she replies. "Yesterday, I had a wonderful breakfast, went for a beautiful walk in the sunshine, had an excellent lunch with my best friends Now, at what point in that story did your attention begin to wander? Pretty soon, I guess. Nobody would read a novel composed of nothing but wonderful experiences."

Did she have a miserable childhood? Atwood reveals few personal details - partly, she says, out of respect for the friends and family of whom one's "private life" is composed. But it seems not to have been particularly awful. Born in 1939 in Ottawa, Canada, the daughter of a dietician mother and an entomologist father, she had an elder brother and, later, a sister 12 years her junior. Her father's insect- studying expeditions meant the family spent months each year living in log cabins in the Canadian woods.

She learned to canoe, scale fish and shoot bows and her books are strong on scientific detail and redolent with the sights and smells of weather, water and earth. "I grew up in a household that was more male than female oriented," she says. "My mother was a tomboy so, until my sister was born, I was the wimp-iest, girliest, sissiest in the family - even though comparatively, I wasn't girlie at all." She and her brother would invent long stories, often about space-ships (the origin, perhaps, of the science fiction strands in The Handmaid's Tale and The Blind Assassin). By now, Atwood was already writing. She had published poetry by the time she went to Toronto University, then Harvard, to study English, which she later taught. In 1967, she won a major Canadian poetry award, and in 1969 published her first novel, The Edible Woman, an amazingly prescient story about eating disorders. Thirty assorted books later, Atwood is a literary giant. The Handmaid's Tale, which became a major film, is probably the most famous and Cat's Eye - a searing account of schoolgirl bullying - won her a huge appreciative mailbag, mainly from women who had experienced victimisation at the hands of bullies like the novel's villainous Cordelia.

At a time when feminist writing focused on male aggression towards women, Atwood - a feminist, but not a "feminist writer" - was breaking the mould by admitting that females are capable of cruelty towards each other. Was the experience drawn from life? Atwood says only that she didn't have to look far for inspiration. "I've been a young girl, I worked on summer camps, I had a young sister and a daughter." Clearly, it's a subject close to her heart. "With girls, best friend and worst enemy can be the same person. The top girl one day may find she's been deposed the next, without knowing why. It's venomous and it's incomprehensible to boys. They have whispering campaigns without including so-and-so, making sure so-and-so knows about it."

But there is more than one way for the cat to scratch and in The Blind Assassin, it is written words which draw blood. "Things written down can cause a great deal of harm," warns Iris, and I wonder if Atwood's own writing has ever caused trauma. "Not a great deal," she says, "and certainly not to family or close friends. But it's hard to represent human experience without finding that someone with whom you have no connection has had that experience. I've had letters from people I've never met who thought they were in my books."

Actually, one unknown stranger did end up in Atwood's latest book. The fly-leaf illustration is an authentic painting of a 1930s society belle, sourced by the publishers. "I assumed it was a soap advertisement, until a woman wrote saying she'd looked in the bookstore window and there was her mother, who had posed for the cover of the Saturday Evening Post in 1934."

Strange things can happen once a book leaves its author's hands. "Writing is three-way. The writer communicates with the thing written, the thing written communicates with the reader and all you can assume is that the message you put in the bottle will, on some far-distant shore, be picked up by the person for whom it is intended."

Atwood, whose conversation drips with literary references, is minded of the preface of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, when the author engages in dialogue with his creation. "He says, 'Go little book, out into the world and find new friends.' And the book says, 'I'm scared, what if people don't like me?' And Bunyan wisely replies, 'Some people don't like chicken, some don't like cheese and some won't like you - in which case, go find someone who does'."

It's the same with people. "Girls, in particular, want everybody to like them, but once they realise they have the right to dislike, and others have the right to dislike them, their problems diminish. Why should you like everyone? Some people are dislikable." Atwood counts herself lucky she came to this realisation early in life, while others turned themselves inside out with guilt and anxiety.

For a woman who doesn't care whether she's liked, frosty old Margaret Atwood turns out to be disarmingly friendly. Before I leave, she offers some parenting tips on bringing up girls in a world full of Cordelias. "Tell your daughters to make a list of all the people they really hate." And what should they do with it? "Nothing. Just acknowledge that they are capable of these emotions. And that it's alright."

The Blind Assassin, Bloomsbury, #16.99 The Booker Prize winner will be announced on November 7. For the shortlist in full, see Books, Page 10.

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NAME: Margaret Atwood

BORN: Ottawa, Canada, 1939 Renowned for the unusually popular appeal of her intelligent, literary fiction, Atwood is also a poet and a respected campaigner for social justice. The Blind Assassin is her fourth novel to be shortlisted for the Booker. The others were The Handmaid's Tale (1985), Cat's Eye (1989) and Alias Grace (1996). She's the bookies' favourite to win this year.

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