A recent tweet by Margaret Atwood to her two million followers featured a photograph of the doughty writer holding a Ukrainian flag while attending an anti-war march in Toronto. At 82, she remains engaged, spirited, and intellectually curious. Most people today know her as the author of The Handmaid’s Tale, but there’s a great deal more to her work than that unnerving dystopian saga.
The Edible Woman, her first novel published over 50 years ago, dealt with a woman reclaiming her place in the world. Since then, there have been other explorations of identity (Surfacing), works of historical fiction (Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin), and speculative fantasies (the MaddAddam trilogy), to name a few. As if this wasn’t enough, she has also authored collections of short fiction and poetry, children’s books and nonfiction.
Her new book, Burning Questions, is the third in a compilation of essays, talks, introductions and other short pieces, this time ranging from 2004 to 2021. Throughout, she blends personal anecdotes with professional observations to investigate the issues that have obsessed her over the years. In her introduction, she writes that many of the pieces started out as attempts to understand “subjects that still occupy my shrinking brain: ‘women’s issues,’ writing and writers, human rights.” Burning questions, indeed.
A no-nonsense and unpretentious tone pervades the book. She is candid about what she knows and what she is finding out, often providing a helpful historical context to the subjects. The problem, if that’s the right word, is that there is too much poured into this collection. There are riches, but not all of these pieces are equally absorbing. A little pruning would have made this omnium-gatherum more potent.
Atwood is generous in conveying her enthusiasm for the work of other writers. Her reading tastes are wide and varied, crossing genres with abandon. Hilary Mantel’s novels are “terrific”, Stephen King “is a pro”, W.G. Sebald is “much admired”, Ursula K. Le Guin is “brilliant”, and Doris Lessing and Ryszard Kapuscinski are “wonderful” and “essential”, respectively.
There are two pieces in appreciation of fellow-Canadian Alice Munro; in one of them, Atwood makes the insightful point that though Munro has often been compared to Chekhov, perhaps she’s more like Cézanne: “You paint an apple, you paint an apple over again, until this utterly familiar object becomes strange and luminous and mysterious; yet it remains only an apple.”
The dangers of climate change and environmental degradation are other threads running through this collection. In a piece to mark the 50th anniversary of Rachel Carson’s momentous Silent Spring, she says that the writer deserves beatification – which is why, in Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, the environmentalist is cast as Saint Rachel of All Birds. Elsewhere, she writes of “perhaps our largest failure”: not understanding that “everything really is connected to everything else. We are a part of Nature: we are not apart from it.”
In a piece to mark the 30th anniversary of the publication of The Handmaid’s Tale, she mentions her now-famous rule: she would not include in it any detail that people had not already done, sometime, somewhere, or that they lacked the technology to do. “In other words, I couldn’t just make stuff up.” Knowing this makes the book – and the TV adaptation – much more chilling.
Later, she underlines the same point with Oryx and Crake. The book invents nothing that people haven’t already invented or started to invent. For her, “every novel begins with a ‘what if,’ and then sets forth its axioms.”
Another burning question of our time, in Atwood’s words, is: why have “citizens in many Western countries been willing to surrender their hard-won freedoms with barely more than a squeak?” (Surely it’s not just in the West.) One answer, she writes, is fear in its many forms, sometimes simply the fear “of not having a pay cheque”.
This attitude of lying low, combined with suppression of free speech and dismantling of an independent judiciary, means that no line of defence will remain for those who raise their heads. After all, “if there’s one thing we ought to know by now, it’s that absolutist systems with no accountability and no checks and balances generate monstrous abuses of power.”
What can the artist do in such an environment? Atwood answers that in another piece on life under Trump. It may be enough to cultivate one’s own “artistic garden”; to do what you can as well as you can for as long as you can. Create alternative worlds that offer moments of insight and “open windows in the given world that allow us to see outside it”. Art should show what it is to be human, “as powerfully and eloquently as possible”. In her illustrious career, this is what Atwood has so fluently tried to achieve.
Live from #toronto #ukraine rally pic.twitter.com/kflDGVnaqx— Margaret E. Atwood (@MargaretAtwood) February 27, 2022
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