Margaret Atwood: ‘You can’t keep the people down’

Margaret Atwood bounds into the room, a diminutive figure in natty black trousers and a bright orange scarf. She’s fresh from starring in a publishing event where readers were clamouring to get their hands on The Testaments, her sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. 

Amazon’s early leak of copies of the novel when it was under heavy embargo caused a furore in the publishing world — The Testaments, which charts events in and outside the repressive Republic of Gilead from the point of view of two generations, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize long before critics had a chance to give their opinions. The highly successful TV adaptation of the original story of Offred, the handmaid forced to bear children by a master class of male Commanders in a totalitarian theocracy, brought Atwood a new generation of fans. Ironically, the veteran Canadian writer also benefited from a “Trump bump” — though her politics of Left-leaning feminism and climate-change activism could not be more opposed to those of the US President.

The word “prophetic” is often  attached to her “speculative fiction” — a kind of worst-case analysis of where our societies might end up if we don’t take more care with our choices. “In a gradually heating bathtub,” observes one woman in The Testaments. “You’d be boiled to death before you knew it.”

Yet Atwood laughs at the notion that she has special powers of augury about our present discontents on either side of the Atlantic. “I don’t have any particular insight into the future — if I did have, I would have cornered the stock market long ago,” she says.

Interviewing her for the “Economist Asks” podcast, a few years after we first met when she had published her MaddAddam trilogy of novels, I find her more relaxed, balancing worries about the drift of American politics and women’s reproductive rights with a playfulness which might surprise those who think of Atwood as a worthy sort.

But she does think societies are dicing with a rollback of progress. She tells me she keeps a box of news cuttings: “I collect stuff I find of interest because I don’t want to be in the position of people saying this is total rubbish, and it would never happen. So I like to be able to say either it has happened or they’re working on it now.”

Her conflict with the Trump worldview runs deep, with women’s rights and the threat she sees posed to them at the heart of her disdain. “He’s packing the courts and looking at certain states such as Alabama, taking this as far as they can. And then the goal is to overturn Roe v Wade [the legal case which guaranteed  basic abortion rights]  — and make a state claim upon women’s bodies as being state property.” Yet Trumpism is not really about fundamentalist religion — do progressives get themselves into a muddle on this score?

“Donald Trump is simply an opportunist, I don’t think he has any particular religious convictions whatsoever. He will pay a certain amount of lip service but it’s very minimal.” She reserves more ire on this score for Mike Pence, the evangelical Vice-President.

The theme of theocracy-run-wild plays a role through The Testaments, as it did in The Handmaid’s Tale — albeit from the perspectives of Offred’s daughters  and Aunt Lydia, offering an explanation of her role as collaborator. I wonder if Atwood frets about her novels straddling fiction and political activism. “You mean, am I writing agitprop?” she shoots back.

“Agitprop would have a plan of what to do. So no — not agitation or propaganda. But I’m posing the question: ‘Is this the house you wish to live in?’ If you don’t want to live in this house, make another blueprint of a house you want to live in.”

We have bonded over the time we both spent in Berlin in the mid-Eighties, living on either side of the Wall. She was in West Berlin, writing The Handmaid’s Tale. “Every Sunday,” she recalls, “the East German Air Force flew by and made sonic booms around us, just to remind us that they were there.”  

She thinks younger readers might need reminding that her other trove of examples of how people behave in extremis was the Second World War. “I’m old enough to have known people who really were in the resistance. Holland had a well-organised resistance; people who managed to escape, who collaborated and who, oddly enough, appeared to be collaborating, but were actually feeding information to the resistance.” That theme of collaboration and resistance is poignantly revisited through Aunt Lydia’s account of her life and collusion in The Testaments.

Atwood has, in the best literary way, a butterfly mind, flitting between subjects but always weaving together themes. Recently, she’s been reading Hilary Mantel’s novels about Henry VIII’s enforcer Thomas Cromwell. “All these regimes have such people, because humans are what they are. And we’re quite capable of putting up camouflage exteriors to disguise our real names and behaviour.” 

Interactions with intensely adoring readers can veer into the absurd. Atwood laughs broadly as she recounts the man at a book-signing who told her that The Handmaid’s Tale, must have been her autobiography. “I said no. He said, ‘Yes, it is!’”

Climate change and its consequences have stalked her work long before Extinction Rebellion. She has a tendency to catastrophism which, like many of the references in her books, is drawn from the Old Testament (needless to say). “Climate-driven, pollution-driven, all of the things that we are saddled with today eventually result in economic and social chaos. With climate crisis comes lower crop yields, and with those, eventually comes food shortage, and joblessness, and all of those kinds of things that feed into social chaos and angry, resentful, French Revolutionary-type feelings.” 

Does she think she and other climate-change activists are winning the battle? “The real activists are people who do nothing else. I’m just somebody who doesn’t happen to have a job. So I can’t be fired.” She thinks Extinction Rebellion is “moving the needle — and you’d have to be an idiot as a politician to not recognise that”.

The Me Too movement was, in one way, the kind of great leap forward you might think Atwood would welcome unconditionally. But she took a nuanced and even critical view, writing in defence of applying due process to those accused of sexual abuse or harassment, based on the case of a Canadian academic she believed had been dismissed before the full facts of the allegations were investigated. Did she think the mentality veered too close to a purge?

“There was a moment there, when [Me Too] was like an invincible weapon to which there was no counter weapon. Whenever you have an invincible weapon to which there is no counter, some will take advantage of it, which they did,” she says tartly. “That’s the history of any social moral panic in which to be accused is to be guilty. I think we’re now in a more reasonable space.”

It feels like an odd state of affairs where the term “bad feminist” can be slapped onto a woman who has written about women’s rights over a career spanning six decades; does that charge bother her?

“If there is a certain way women are  supposed to think,  you’re in the area of Big Brother’s watching you. Except in this case, it was big sister. ” Her strongest aversion, she adds, is to a mentality which says: “Here’s a party line… [if you disagree] we will stomp on you with our large boots. At which point [I say] ‘I don’t have a job, so fire me!’”

What does this outspoken visitor she make of arriving in our very own, dysfunctional island in the week of maximum Brexit chaos. “It’s Cavaliers v  Roundheads all over again with you-know-who playing Charles I.” 

That would be a prime ministerial you-know-who?  She appears reluctant to grant him a name. “Your know, the  ‘big girl’s blouse’ person. I had to have that explained to me because they didn’t know what it was. And why was it a blouse rather than an evening gown or some other article of apparel?”

We chat about the role of the Queen, drawn into the row about the prorogation of Parliament. “Well, it’s a constitutional monarchy,” parries Atwood. “It’s kind of what she has to do.” Given that she’s clearly not in the Brexiteer camp, I wonder if she thinks the Queen — also head of state in Atwood’s native Canada — should have advised differently.

Atwood switches gear, and adopts the voice of a rather posh older lady, “Well, somebody of my age, dear, remembers the war. The royal family was excellent during the war. They could have gone to the Bahamas. But they didn’t. They stuck it out.” Still on side with Her Majesty, then. 

She’s just taken part in an edgy fashion shoot for the Sunday Times’ Style magazine, at 79, rocking an array of cutting-edge designers with curly grey locks teased to look like a wild enchantress.

“I have the hair extensions in a bag. I think I might offer it up as a fundraiser at an auction for a charity of choice, lots of money and I’ll put the hair extensions in and turn up at your house. Do you think you’d pay for that?”  No question about that.

Chilling us with dire scenarios of humanity gone wrong seems to keep her extraordinarily cheerful. “I am hopeful about human nature,” she says. “You  can keep some of the people down some of the time, and most of the people down most of the time, but you can’t keep all of the people down all the time.”

Anne McElvoy’s “The Economist Asks” podcast interview with Margaret Atwood is available at economist.com/podcasts/