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Cover Story: Old myths, new truths
Independent, The (London), Oct 28, 2005 by BOYD TONKIN
It's not every day that one leaves an interview with a life- saving wilderness tip to impart. Margaret Atwood became a keen frequenter of the Canadian north during the childhood summers spent with her entomologist father at an insect-research station in the backwoods of Quebec. There, she learnt 'lots of rules about what to do around water, lightning, bears " the three things that were most dangerous'. As for those beasts, her advice is simple: 'Don't wear perfume around bears. It smells like food to them; it smells sweet. They like honey and flowers and berries. They can't see very well but they have a very acute sense of smell.' We have been warned.
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Predation and survival, the dance of the hunters and the hunted, runs like a red thread through the explorations of human nature, and non-human nature, that have made Atwood one of the most widely admired and avidly followed writers at work in the world today. Times are perennially tough in Atwood territory, with the graces of civilisation often a thin veneer waiting for a lethal crack from without " or, generally, from within. In 1972, her landmark guide to Canadian literature carried the title Survival; 30 years later, the harassed vagrant 'Snowman' stumbled through a mutant-infested genetic wasteland left by ecological disaster and botched science in the novel Oryx and Crake.
This summer, the writer who recalls that 'I spent a lot of my childhood without electricity' worked at an Inuit sewing, healing and literacy camp on the treeless side of the Canadian far north. These days, the polar bears in the region are hungrier than ever, 'because of global warming. The shore ice, which they usually go on to hunt seals " that's diminishing.' So those ravenous predators approached the camp; not once, but five times. Luckily, 'we had three excellent hunters with us. They simply knew how to chase off the bears, and what to do next. And I slept like a baby in my tent, because I knew that they were standing guard, turn and turn about, all night.'
When Atwood surveys the wild and perilous pre-modern world of Homer and the Odyssey, as she does in The Penelopiad (Canongate), you feel that she can draw on more than merely the written sources. A famously supportive home life in Toronto for more than 30 years with the novelist and naturalist Graeme Gibson (they have a late- twenties daughter, Jess) is the base camp from which she treks out time and again into the artistic, the moral and " often enough " the actual wilderness. Atwood still thrives where Graham Greene yearned to patrol: on the dangerous edge of things.
The Penelopiad forms part of the series of retold myths that Jamie Byng of Canongate " in partnership with a dozen other European publishers " has commissioned from the gods and goddesses of modern literature (see book review, page 24). She reports that Byng, like a sprite out of some Border ballad, 'leapt out from behind a gorse bush in Scotland and talked me into it'. That, in itself, was a coup that the golden-voiced charmer Odysseus himself might envy.
With her books taught in about three-quarters of British universities, the novelist, poet and critic " now 65 " has scaled such heights of eminence that even her screen adapters can pick up the Nobel Prize. That gong has this month gone to Harold Pinter, who in 1990 scripted Volker Schlndorff's film of The Handmaid's Tale. Written in 1984, her dystopian vision of a woman-controlling Puritanical theocracy remains, for an army of readers, the dry, fierce quintessence of Atwood's endlessly speculative fictions.
Sitting in her publisher's west London office, Atwood sounds neither dry, nor fierce, but given rather to delighted hoots of laughter that punctuate her carefully phrased answers. She purrs with pleasure at the honour for her collaborator, whose work she admiringly described as 'prickly, bothersome, mordant and dour', and as 'coming up on you sideways with an alarming glare'. Now, she says: 'I was particularly touched by the picture of him in the paper in which he looked childishly happy " innocently happy. Which is not a look you usually see coming from Mr Pinter. He looked genuinely surprised " 'How could this be happening?' It was quite lovely.'
Fine of feature, neat of phrase, Atwood can mix warm and funny with exacting and erudite. Maybe that's not a combination that journalists often expect. Previous interviewers have from time to time returned with tales of Pinteresque silences at the court of a supercilious ice queen. That may say much more about them than her " especially if they came to seek some gushing confessional. According to the maxim she passed on in her 2002 Cambridge lectures, Negotiating with the Dead: 'Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pat.' Atwood remains very much the airborne fowl, not the inert quarry.
This, as any serious fan of her work will grasp, is a writer who revels not in artless self-expression but in the liberating discipline of form. At one point as we talk, she quotes the Canadian scholar Robert Bringhurst, who said that 'form in poetry is like the wing of a bird. It does not cause flight to happen, but without it there would be no flight.' 'That's my feeling about form in general,' Atwood says. 'Unless you know what the form is, breaking out of it would be pointless. Take dress codes. Unless you know that you're supposed to wear a ballgown and long gloves, coming in a miniskirt instead is pointless.' That enabling command of form and rules may shape a poem, a play, a novel, a review " or even a mere interview.
